


Per Aspera

by northerntrash



Category: The Hobbit - All Media Types
Genre: Actual Thief Bilbo, Alternate Universe - Erebor Never Fell, Blind!Frerin, Durin Feels, HRBB14, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-12-17
Updated: 2015-11-12
Packaged: 2018-03-01 21:59:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 12
Words: 56,847
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2789201
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/northerntrash/pseuds/northerntrash
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Deep in the dungeons of the Kingdom of Erebor, in an old, unused storeroom, lived a Hobbit.</p><p>In which Bilbo Baggins, a strangely successful thief, makes a mistake, and meets a Prince.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> Urgh, what's this? Second story for the day? FML. I'm going back to bed. 
> 
> Welcome to the second of my HRBB14 prompts. This is my first Erebor-never-fell AU, and I've really enjoyed myself - and I hope you guys do, too. Many thanks to closetshipping for the wonderful prompt - you can see the original over on tumblr.

The mighty Erebor had been carved from stone by the hands of countless numbers of Mahal’s creations, and long had it stood as the greatest of the remaining Dwarven kingdoms, as strong and timeless as the mountain that it was in, ever growing and prospering. Metal and jewel still poured from their mines, the veins and ore still as rich as it has ever been, filling the coffers and treasuries higher each day, and the dwarves of the Kingdom enjoyed the fruits of their labour, content and well fed, each and every trade transaction backed up with the weight of the Law of the Mountain.

Many dwarves could be heard to remark to themselves that when the world fell, it would only be Erebor that was left, as impossible as it was for so many to believe that it would ever disappear.

The appearance of the Dragon, almost two hundred years ago now (and still in living memory for many of the dwarves) had only cast this belief further in stone. If Erebor could withstand the attack of a Dragon, then surely it would and could survive anything, though many were less inclined to remember that it had been Girion of Dale that had shot the beast down, not any of Mahal’s folk.

The skull, set over the great mithril and iron gates of the Mountain, served as a constant reminder of their victory, and their continuing survival, and was a point of pride to all who thought of Erebor as home.

But whilst the dwarves in the Mountain continued to live rich, content lives, things were not so well in the lands around it.

The once-Greenwood had grown darker in recent years, the elves retiring to the growing shadows under the trees and coming out less often; their trade with the men of Dale trickled slower than ever before as they waited out these dark times under bough and leaf, the long span of their lives convincing them that soon enough, as all things do, it would pass.

But for Dale, whose men and women lived such shorter lives than the folk of their neighbouring Kingdoms, it was near impossible now to remember the days when their kin had been as wealthy as the dwarves, when they had lived with ease and weighted money bags. For as the Mountain had grown ever brighter in the jewel of the dwarven crown, so too had Dale declined, for whilst once the King had kept open trade with the line of Girion, in recent years the tax on that trade had increased exponentially, their gifts of goodwill disappearing, the friendship that had once existed between the two Kingdoms turning instead to distrust, and bitterness.

There were children starving in the streets of Dale; its Lord tried his hardest to ration what little they had and what little they were given so that it all went around fairly, but there came a point when there was simply no longer enough, and some began to go without.

Whilst Bard sat in his sparse room and tried to make ends meet (for wasn’t there another leak in the roof of the orphanage, didn’t the city guard once again need more recruits, wasn’t there once more a blight on the crops, meaning the harvest had been poorer than usual?) the King of Carven Stone sat on his great throne, his wrists and beard heavy with finely woven gold chains, his eyes blind to the world beyond his own, great halls.

Thror had sat on that throne for centuries now, in some ways as timeless to his subjects as the Mountain was itself, his hair more silver than anything else, and though he was rich in comfort and in love, it was muttered that some seed of discontent had planted in his mind at the attack of the dragon, some nameless fear for all that he had, a greed as deep as his bones and as solid as his axe causing his fists to clench ever tighter around what he had, making him forget his friends, turn aside his allies, and step away from his family.

His people might have said that it was at the arrival, but it was his family that understood the truth of the matter: it had begun long before the dragon had arrived, when out of the rock had come the Arkenstone, still shining above his throne as brightly as it had ever done, though now the white-blue light of the thing cast unpleasant shadows across the King’s face and lit his skin with a sallow, unhealthy pallor.

His son watched with discomfort from the side of the throne, knowing that he too felt the pull of that stone, afraid of what raising his hand to stop his father’s ever growing madness might end up achieving.

And past him, along that royal dais, stood the King’s grandchildren, and great-grandsons; there stood royal advisors as close to kin to the King as any could claim to be, their fear growing ever stronger each day; behind them again came the discontented murmurs of the Royal Court, who watched the odd light in the eyes of the King with not-always altruistic concern.

Erebor prospered, and Erebor grew, but not all was well in the last great Kingdom of the dwarves.

About the battlements the ravens muttered to themselves: no longer would they offer their words of wisdom to the King as they had once had, and now Thror barely allowed their presence within the Mountain, enraged at what he saw as a betrayal of an old friend. The matriarch of the Ravens shook her feathered head and spoke instead to her kin, watching the Mountain with dark, disconsolate eyes, though sometimes she still spoke to Thrain, through the window of his study.

The elves had stopped sending envoys to the Mountain years ago; Tharkun, once an old and loyal friend of their kind, had not been seen in centuries, not since the Dragon had just been a rotting corpse across the rock of the Mountain.

And deep within the Mountain, the shadow of the King’s madness grew ever deeper as his demands to his people became ever harsher, as a larger and larger proportion of the wealth of the mines filled his own vaults, and though he had enough advisors tweaking the figures to ensure that no one ever went without, it was becoming more and more obvious that they still were not quite getting what they  _should._

Erebor was as beautiful as it had ever been, but it was becoming a strange and distrustful place.

But even further into the Mountain, below the throne room and past the Guardhouse, were the ever-filling dungeons. More and more dwarves were send there under the King's Law now, and there in the dark they hang their weary heads, and listen.

They listen for the sound of the guards, for the quiet clink of a friend come to retrieve them - for the wardens were as easily bribed as any in the Mountain. They listen for the sound of a plate left outside their door, for the sound of dripping water, for the whisper of a blade in the dark.

But they also listen for the quiet padding of bare feet against the rock. It didn't come often, but they had all heard it, at one time or another, and they murmured to each other through the bars of their cells about the ghost that wandered through the keep, for though they all stared into the darkness whenever the sound echoed through the narrow passageway, not one of them had ever seen any figure, just the occasional, darting shadow.

It wasn’t a ghost, though.

Far from it.

No, deep in the dungeons of the Kingdom of Erebor, in an old, unused storeroom, lived a Hobbit, far from home but far from foolish, and it is with this Hobbit that our story begins.


	2. Chapter One

The chamber was oddly quiet as Bilbo Baggins padded through it; though the floors were flagged and the ceilings tall, his feet made very little sound, his quiet breathing barely an echo in the vaulted rooms. Nor was there the sound of any passing guard or nearby visitor, which was odd, considering that this was the private Royal treasury of the great Kingdom of Erebor, shining jewel of the Dwarves and the ultimate challenge to any aspiring thief or cut-purse.

Which was exactly what Bilbo was, though aspiring might have been stretching it a little too far at this point – he had been creeping in here for months now, without anyone knowing.

In itself, that might have been considered a little odd, and Bilbo would have been the first to admit that most people would not have believed him had he boasted that he was able to slip so easily past the guards and the sentries, past the great, heavy doors that were kept bolted and barred with the greatest of dwarven secrecy at all but the rarest of times. Those doors were far larger than any normal door, and infinitely stronger, and rumour had it that when they were fitted, many centuries before, the locksmith had had all the greatest thieves brought from the cells and promised their freedom if they could get through them.

The doors had remained resolutely closed, and the thieves had all gone back to their cells that night; of course, they hadn’t been the greatest of _all_ thieves, as Nori could often be found commenting when the story came up and he had had one cup too many of the potent spirits traded about the prison.

The best thieves weren’t in the prisons at all, because they had never been caught.

Bilbo Baggins was not the greatest of thieves.

Nori wasn't, either, but he was a much better contender for the title - whilst he might have spent a spell or two in those prisons as well, inevitably one morning the guards would always come to find his cell empty, his blankets neatly folded, and a cheery farewell rune scratched on the rock above his cot.

Bilbo couldn’t pick a lock the same way that Nori could, and he couldn’t even blend very well into the background: Hobbits were not often found this far to the East (in fact, he was quite certain that he might be the only one), and so were often stared and commented upon when spotted. He could walk pretty quietly, that much was true, and could be light fingered when he wanted to be, but he would never consider himself particularly skilled.

But whilst Bilbo might not have had a natural talent, he did have two other things: a ring, and a door.

Both were peculiar and had come to Bilbo through some quite odd circumstances. The ring had been found several years ago now, in a deep cave far below the Misty Mountains in the middle of a rather long and tiresome journey. He wore it around his neck on a chain, and for all intents and purposes it could have simply been a plain gold band, not too dissimilar from the wedding rings that many married people who could afford such a luxury might wear. He'd passed it off as his father's wedding ring on more than one occasion.

It had saved his life many times now, and it was with this that Bilbo walked without concern about being seen, for it rendered the wearer entirely invisible. Through what magic or cunning it did this Bilbo had never been entirely certain, but he was more than a little grateful of it as he rounded the corner of one of many great piles of chests to reveal something he had never come across before.

Now, when he had first found himself in here, he had almost been a little disappointed: he had expected a treasury to be infinitely more _exciting,_ with great piles of gold and jewels beyond measure or count, but he had quite quickly realised just how impractical that idea was, because at the end of the day, it rather _had_ to be counted.

Surely that was in fact the point?

Instead, the treasure was kept in great, bound chests, ordered in some impressive system that Bilbo was still trying to figure out. When he had first arrived he had spent many fruitless hours awkwardly fumbling with his lockpicks until he opened a chest only to discover, to his disappointment, that it was stuffed full of cut sapphires of all different shapes and sizes, beautiful and easy to carry but essentially useless: the smallest ones he might just have been able to sell on, but even then it would raise suspicion. The diamonds he had found next had had the same issues: even the lowest quality stones still far surpassed anything that you would find down in Dale these days, and it wasn’t worth his skin to try and sell an Ereborian jewel within the Kingdom: they knew the risks of tricking the King from his due better than anyone.

A true thief, in here for the excitement and the glory, would have been tempted by the great cabinets in the middle of the room, containing the most precious of relics, the most beautiful of objects, the largest of the gems: the greatest treasures of Erebor, bar the Arkenstone, which was reported to sit above the King’s throne, a symbol of his strength and his honour.

But Bilbo didn’t turn to those cabinets, and neither were his eyes drawn to the great gold ingots, gleaming dully in the low light.

What he had been after had been the silver: easy enough to melt down and pass off as something plausible.

Gold and jewels were all well and good for those who could afford them, but there was no way in hell that Finn would take a necklace in exchange for fish, nor that Singra would have been willing to barter bread for blue john: no one else would accept them in turn, for fear of discovery by the guards.

So, silver it had to be, and luckily, he’d found it soon enough. Though the storage system had obviously been put in place to make the cataloguing of the treasure easier, it was quite clear that most of these chests had not been touched in years: there was a thick layer of dust covering most of them, and Bilbo had been very careful to find one in the shadows, one which he could disturb without the likelihood of it being seen.

And for the last six months that is what he had been doing whenever he had needed to: he slipped on his ring, quietly returned to the door which remained his own secret, found his chest, and removed a enough of the unmarked silver coin to fill his purse enough for the next couple of weeks, that he could slip down to Dale with to trade for a sack full of food without too many raised eyebrows or pointed looks.

And, more importantly, without the guards noticing.

In all that time, Bilbo had never seen another person in the treasury, though that perhaps might not have been that surprising given that he had been quite deliberately coming outside of normal working hours in an attempt to avoid being overheard – the punishment for theft was high enough, let along for theft from the royal treasury.

But as he rounded that corner he was stopped short by an unexpected sight, his heart fluttering madly despite the fact that he was invisible: there was a dwarf, crouched over one of the largest chests, one which Bilbo had never even bothered to touch. He was half-turned away from the hobbit, hair silvered and settled heavily about his brow, his face pulled into a deep and furious frown. The lock was swinging open, the contents bared to the room, and a white-hot flare of panic set through Bilbo’s chest.

“It’s not here,” the dwarf mumbled, an odd and desolate tone to his voice as his hand pawed through the long, intricate chains that were piled in the chest, the odd strand escaping from his fingers and falling around his crouched figure with a strange, disconcerting sound in the echoing room. “It’s not _in here._ ”

“Grandfather, I-”

“Hold your tongue!”

Bilbo took an involuntary step back as he realised that there was a third person in the room, one who had been standing in the shadows until then and who Bilbo would have recognised anywhere – it was difficult indeed not to notice one of the immediate royal family. Which meant, of course, that…

Grandfather.

Bilbo swallowed, and took another step quickly away from the King Under the Mountain, crouched and disconsolate amongst his gold and gaudy baubles. Neither Grandfather nor Grandson seemed aware of his presence, the elder dwarf clearly distracted and the younger discontent, if the hard line of his mouth was any indication – which was odd, really, because the prince was nearly always grinning in portraits of him, laughter always dancing in his unseeing, bright eyes whenever he toured Dale.

Unlike his father, of course, or even his older brother, though maybe the contrast was only so stark because Prince Frerin was rarely seen without the company of his brother, almost as if the family didn’t quite trust their Prince not to do something that he should not. It was strange that Frerin might be here today without Thorin, but Bilbo barely had time to think of that.

Bilbo took another step back, around the corner again, away from the scene, and then, quite suddenly, into something that wasn’t supposed to be there.

A hand closed over his mouth, and another in a rather crushing hold around his ribs, before the person even had a chance to make more than an astonished huff: Bilbo found himself pressed against a chest, and quite unable to move, without warning enough to do anything to escape.

“Well,” came a low, quiet voice, pitched almost to a whisper. “I don’t know what you are, but I would warn you, my Grandfather does not take well to burglars in the treasury.”

 

* * *

 

There was nothing that made him feel more uncomfortable than watching his Grandfather paw through the treasury: thankfully it was rare enough that Thror wanted company that it was not often that he ended up here. Normally it just involved standing around whilst his Grandfather checked over whatever precious item he had suddenly remembered and _needed_ to check up on, but today had been a little different.

“There is someone in here,” Frerin had said to him, very quietly, the moment they had paused as their Grandfather had found the chest he was searching for. His hands had been pressed against the stone, his fingers feeling the rock, feeling some movement deep within the echo of the Mountain. “Someone moving quietly.”

Thorin had nodded, not needing to say anything more: Frerin’s eyes were staring blankly ahead, unable to see, but his fingers still traced the smooth rock behind him, attuned to the movement and murmur of the stone with a skill that Thorin would never have been able to match.

Frerin never called himself blind; how could he be blind, he often asked, when he could see how many people were in one of the Great Halls just by stroking his hand against the flag stones?

He trusted his brother implicitly in this, and Thorin slipped quietly through the corridors formed by the great piles of chests, taller than he, stacked high with the riches of his Grandfather's Kingdom. If Frerin said that there was an intruder, then an intruder their would be, and his hand rested carefully on the hilt of his sword, though he did not draw it yet: he would rather not alert the King to any particular problem just yet. 

The old dwarf was temperamental at the best of times, let alone when his mind had disappeared into his hoarded gold. 

The chests cast strange shadows, lit in a peculiar way by the torchlight reflected by the gold ingots stacked and unsorted in the middle of the room - they should have been away, but Thror liked to keep at least a little of his wealth on show. 

He said the gold-light soothed him, though it only ever sent a twisting stab of fear through Thorin's chest. 

He dropped almost silently to the ground, his fingertips tracing the dust, where it had recently been disturbed. 

But as he continued to pad quietly through the chamber he almost began to doubt, though Frerin had never been wrong before: he saw no one, and heard nothing but the occasional noise of anger from his Grandfather, and the sound of those gold chains falling through his fingers with a sound almost as slick as water as they pooled around him. 

Perhaps the thief had already escaped, he had thought for a moment, but as he came closer to the other two dwarves again, and Frerin felt him approach, he shook his head, trying to convey to his brother that the burglar was still there. 

And then some small body had thumped against his chest, so quickly that it had taken him half a moment to react and grab hold of them; their wrist was strangely delicate in his hand, fey and bird-like, the bones pressing too close to the skin, as if the creature had not eaten enough in quite some time. 

It was surely not a dwarf, its body too slight and small for that, but neither could it be man or elf - perhaps a human child? But how would a child - how would anyone - be able to hide themselves from his sight even as Thorin held them fast, glaring into space as he tried to find something, anything, that would give him away. 

“What are you?” he hissed, when the creature made no sound but for a startled noise.

No response came, but he had hardly expected it to; his hand tightened around the thin shoulder.

He knew full well that he should have called for the guards, that if he pulled his sword and dispensed of the thief now that Thror would only have praise for his Grandson for protecting the treasury - and by Mahal's forge, he and his family could have done with earning back some trust from the paranoid King.

But Thorin's hand did not fall back to his blade, and the words died in his throat when he thought to raise the alarm. What to do? He would not murder this creature, whatever it was, until he knew more: he was not his Grandfather, to cast the lot of death upon any who might steal a coin from his hoard, a coin he would never even miss. Its skin was paper-fine and its bones too sharp: though Thorin could not see the creature, its body spoke enough of starvation under his hands to make him hesitate.

His Grandfather was still muttering to himself, and from here he could just about see Frerin’s expression, pulled into a worried frown. He could have called for the guards - regardless of how hungry the invisible thief might have been, he had still committed a crime, and should have been prosecuted accordingly under the King's Law. Yet still he did not raise his voice: his eyes were stuck instead on his Grandfather, on that strangely unfamiliar face that he had known his entire life. The old dwarf was paranoid enough about the vaults.

If he knew that someone was creeping around in here, he might just start sleeping on top of his gold ingots, and then they really would be in for some problems.

It was as he was wavering about what to do that there came a sharp, needling pain against the soft skin on the inside of his wrist, sudden and intense, just enough to make him loosen his grip. It was only for a second, but it was enough to let the figure slip from his grasp.

There was a faint sound, but as he turned to try and hear where it was coming from it disappeared. 

The tracks in the dust were a confused mess of the marks left by his own boots and... strangely large, bare footprints.

He couldn't tell which direction the creature had slipped off to.

"Thorin!" barked his Grandfather, "Thorin! Come here!"

He started, strangely unsure of himself, as Thror's voice boomed around him, surrounded by the dust and the shine of hoarded gold.

Thorin frowned to himself, as he walked back to the King.

There was an invisible thief in Erebor, and he wasn’t entirely sure what to do about it.


	3. Chapter Two

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> damn it, i meant to post this sooner. sorry, guys!

Though the thief – whatever or whoever it was – had slipped with impossible speed from his grasp, Thorin was unable to forget the encounter quite so quickly. His hesitation in calling the guards plagued him as he tried to sleep for the next few nights, wondering whether he had done the right thing. Certainly trying not to exacerbate his Grandfather’s growing paranoia could only be praised, but the fact of the matter was that someone _had_ managed to get into the royal treasury – and who knew what it had managed to steal?

What would his Grandfather’s reaction be if it emerged that the creature had stolen some heirloom, some great ceremonial sword or priceless piece of jewellery?

Worst still was that he was unable to share his concerns with the few confidantes that he kept, ones which even now were eyeing him with some concern from across the breakfast table- even his brother, who could not see the deep frown across his brow that Dis had already commented upon that morning. At least her two sons had not quite managed to make the early meal that they tended to keep – apparently they had been kept up late by their rounds with the guards, a role that their mother rather insisted that they took and which the pair, despite their grumblings, enjoyed a far sight more than they did their long lessons on political stratagem and legal history.

It was Vili that was watching him with particular concern, but Thorin distracted himself with the bacon and pretended not to notice. His brother-in-law had rather an irritating habit of getting even the most closed and indifferent dwarf to open up and admit his innermost concerns and feelings, something which had rather gotten the worst of both Thorin and his equally stoic sister on more than one occasion.

Even Dwalin had ended up crying to him over ale before, though he denied that it ever happened if you brought it up.

“Oh, come on, Thorin,” Frerin broke, in the end, reaching for the summer preserves. “I can feel your gloom even from here. What’s happened?”

But to tell even one person would implicate them if ever their Grandfather found out about, and the last few decades had stripped the King of all but the scantest loyalty to anyone but himself.

“I was thinking of the other day, in the treasury,” he admitted, quite honestly, and a flash of understanding flickered through Frerin’s unseeing eyes, obviously remembering the warning that he had given Thorin. They had barely spoken of it since, though Thorin was just waiting for the moment when the two of them were alone: Frerin hadn’t seemed to believe the brief words of reassurance that Thorin had been able to mutter to him as they had left.

And why would he? The stone didn’t see things out of the corner of its eyes that weren’t really there, as people did. But Frerin trusted Thorin as much as he in turn trusted Frerin, trusted him enough to let it be, for now.

It distracted the rest of the table, though.

“How was Grandfather?” Dis asked, quietly.

Thorin merely shrugged.

“He found what he was looking for in the end,” he replied, and Dis nodded.

“Well, it isn’t like anything could go missing from there,” she said in turn, and Vili murmured in agreement.

But things obviously _could_ , if someone could slip inside without anyone knowing, and he sank back into deep thought as he tried to work out _how_.

It seemed unthinkable that they would be able to get through the main doors, not just because of how complex and strong the locks were, but also because of the constant guard watch outside. Of course, the invisible burglar could have followed them inside, but it seemed unlikely: Frerin had known the moment they came in that there was already someone there.

Which left, of course, only one option: that there was another way into the treasury.

But how to go about investigating? If he sent guards in to search, word would immediately get back to his Grandfather, and no doubt he would overreact at the thought that Thorin knew something about his treasury that he himself didn’t; likewise, if just Thorin went in search, and the King heard of it, he would suspect his oldest Grandson of theft – at the very best. At the worst, there might be mutters of treason, and not just from the King – there was more than one member of the court willing to spread a rumour if they thought it might snare them the ear of the King.

There was always the option of telling just Frerin and Dwalin; Frerin would be able to feel out anything in the rock that was not supposed to be there, and Dwalin, as second in command of the Royal Guard after his father Fundin, would have the weight to change the guard rotation so it was he at the door, his loyalty more than enough to ensure his silence.

But even if they found some secret entrance or thieves’ passage way, it still wouldn’t immediately answer the question of who that small, invisible creature was, or by what magic they padded silently from one treasure chest to another.

Thorin sighed, once more, and turned back to his breakfast, still at a loss as what to do.

 

* * *

 

 

It was almost a week later, the problem still unresolved, that he ran into the invisible thief again.

Or, at least- he thought that he had.

He was touring the dungeons with Dwalin when it happened. They were fuller than they had been in centuries, and there was debate about reopening an old section, long abandoned, to make additional room: they had been closed due to concerns about the structural safety of the vaulted archways of the cells, but according to the architect he was with, it wouldn’t be too difficult to shore them up safely again.

Once it would have been the job of the King to listen to such plans, and to agree to them, but in the last century he had delegated more and more tasks to his heirs and family, preferring instead to sit on his throne and bask in the glow of the King’s Gem.

Each cell looked roughly the same, some with abandoned cots in and others without. Here and there were the debris of abandonment; the skeleton of a rat, the grey veil of cobwebs, but his eye was almost immediately caught by the sight of one cell that had been swept quite clean.

It was a narrow space, and as he took a step closer to the door it revealed itself to be quite neat, given that it should have been abandoned for many long years.

And there – melted wax, on the floor, as if it had dripped from a candle.

There too – a waterskin, tucked away on the windowsill.

And underneath the old cot, rolled up and stowed as if someone had tried quickly to hide it, and old, thin blanket, a little frayed around the edges.

“Were these left here by your crew?” Thorin had asked, quietly, as Dwalin’s hand had tightened around the axe at his hip. The architect had shuffled, uncomfortably.

“I’ve only been down here two or three times,” she answered, taking a step back. “And none of my workers have been.”

Thorin’s own hand was drifting to his weapon now, and his frown was growing deeper.

“Was this here then?” Dwalin asked, through slightly gritted teeth, and she shook her head.

“I only looked in a couple of cells,” she replied, her eyes darting back and forwards. “I didn’t see anyone living down here.”

Thorin took a step into the room, and to his left heard an almost silent intake of breath, barely audible. But when he looked, there was no one there. It was a strange sense of déjà vu that had him shift slightly closer, move his hand out passed the door frame where Dwalin could not see, and grasp, trying to keep his motions smooth and subtle, so that the others would not notice.

There was the faint sensation of movement in the air, and the touch of fabric against his fingertips for the briefest of moments before it was pulled hurriedly away.

Thorin swallowed.

The thief was here – unless of course there was another invisible creature in Erebor, a thought which did not really bare thinking about – and pinned in the corner by the cot and by Thorin himself. There would be no escape if he just reached out again, and grabbed a hold of him, and yet… he did not.

What would it achieve? The situation had not changed from the week before, in the treasury. And now he would have to explain to an increasingly paranoid King how he had _known_ that there was an invisible thief, no doubt one with a stack of treasury-pilfered items that would be discovered when this little cell (or indeed, the entire dungeons) were properly searched.

And then treason wouldn’t just be muttered, would it?

He took a slow, measured step back towards the door.

“Just a vagrant,” he said, letting his hand slip from his sword. “Gone now, no doubt. They’ll have to clear out when the building work starts, anyway.”

Dwalin was giving him a strange look now, and Thorin bit back the curse to the Maker that fought his tongue – why had he been given such perceptive relatives? Dwalin had been hit around the head in their youth more times that Thorin could count, and he could still tell when something wasn’t right.

But Thorin just shook his head, and they continued on with their inspection, though he barely listened to a word that the architect said from that point onwards, too distracted by the thoughts of the strange little thief living in their dungeons – because that is what they must have been doing, surely? This was more than just a place to store their loot or bolt too – it had been swept with the certain sort of loving care that was only ever given to a place that you intended to stay in for some time.

Why would he be living in the dungeons? All Dwarves living in Erebor were given the right to rooms (though Thror was beginning to make murmurs about that particular arrangement, according to Balin and his mother, who were on the King’s inner council and who were loyal to Thrain and Thorin to a fault).

Thorin waved on the architect and Dwalin when they reached the end of the tour, even though he knew that it would only add to the strange way that his family had been looking at him recently. His cousin and friend looked for a moment as if he might argue, and had they been alone he probably would: instead, he glanced across at the architect and nodded, though he didn’t look too happy about it.

As soon as they were out of sight Thorin slipped back to the thief’s cell, where he hesitated in the doorway for a moment.

“I…” he began, before realising that he wasn’t entirely sure what to say.  

 

* * *

 

Bilbo wondered whether or not his heart had stopped.

He really couldn’t be sure.

Prince Thorin had _felt_ the sleeve of his tunic, had heard his involuntary intake of breath when the dwarf had walked into the damp little cell that he called home – and damn his exhaustion, damn the heavy sleep of the nap he had been taking that hadn’t alerted him to their presence sooner – but Thorin had not reached for him, though he quite clearly knew that Bilbo was hiding in the corner, his ring on but his presence still felt.

He let out a long, slightly painful noise, at the thought of capture, and then immediately bit his knuckle to try and silence himself again.

And had that been a warning, strange and oddly phrased? What building work was going on, and would it have something to do with the dwarf who had been down here a couple of times recently?

Bilbo settled back down on the edge of his narrow cot, and tried very hard not to yell aloud in frustration. It was not worth the risk of trying to sneak out whilst there were Dwarves in the prison – his best bet was to remain as quietly as possible until he was sure that they were gone, and then move on – though where too, he wasn’t quite sure.

He needed to be more careful.  Much, much more careful.

 But before he could think of anything, the Prince had returned, looking around himself cautiously as if convinced that Bilbo was about to jump out at him and gouge his eyes out. He almost found himself smiling even as a curl of panic tightened in his chest. He wondered for a moment if this was what a rabbit caught in a share felt like: knowing full well that there was no escape, but still trying as hard as it could to deny the inevitable.

“What are you?” Thorin eventually asked the shadows, his eyes on the corner where Bilbo had been standing before. Of course he did not answer, and he watched with some cautious interest as Thorin rubbed at his forehead, as if he were tired.

“I doubt you are even here,” he continued, his voice a little quieter now. “I’m not going to turn you in, whatever you are, but building work starts here in a month so you will need to be out by then.”

He hesitated for a moment longer in the doorway, and his eyes were a bright blue-grey as they scanned the room one last time.

For a moment Bilbo was sure that they looked right at him, but then they just passed by once more, searching for some flicker of movement that would give him away.

Bilbo kept perfectly still, and tried his hardest not to breathe.

Thorin looked as if he were about to say something else, but then he just cursed under his breath, and left, instead.


	4. Chapter Three

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the delay, I've been working on a funding proposal. Also, completely un-beta'd, because I just don't have the time or energy but really shouldn't put off posting any longer.

Bilbo fluttered about his cell for a very confused and conflicted hour after Thorin had left, trying to decide whether to go or to leave. He had grown comfortable here (well, as comfortable as could really be expected in a dark cell in an abandoned dungeon) but whilst Thorin had _sounded_ sincere enough, it would certainly be wise of him to leave, lest the Crown Prince change his mind.

After all, the King’s blood were known for swift changes of heart, on matters far more important than one hobbit living in the cells.

He had just about convinced himself that he should try and find somewhere else to go – perhaps to return to the actual city proper inside the Mountain, and try and find Nori – when the footsteps of an armoured dwarf came echoing down the hallway. Bilbo listened for a very careful second and he placed the blanket that he had just picked up to store away in his sack back on the bed. Though the dwarf was clearly _trying_ to be stealthy, they were not having much luck with it – their heavy tread would have been heard a mile off by anyone.

Bilbo slipped on his ring, and made sure to hide himself much more successfully this time. There was a small crevasse in the wall of the hallway, some old crack having grown over time, perhaps under the weight of the city above them. It had widened and deepened, and though would certainly not have been big enough for any dwarf to clamber into, it was enough for a hobbit to hide in – even without his ring, Bilbo was able to press himself deep enough inside the stone that it would have taken keen eyes to spot him in the darkness. As it was, with his ring he was rendered utterly invisible, and the dwarf passed by without even flicking a glance in his direction, though they did peer curiously around Bilbo’s cell when they stepped inside.

His shoulders stiffened slightly as Bilbo watched, as if they were about to say something to the darkness, but in the end the dwarf simply shook his head underneath the guard’s helmet. They pulled a small bag out of somewhere in their clothing, and placed it gently, almost reverently on the floor in the middle of the room, before walking backwards.

Their back hit the wall so close to the crevasse that Bilbo felt his heart stammer in his chest, his breath catching in his throat, but the guard was not looking at him – instead, he simply made a rune-sign across his chest. Bilbo was stuck at too odd an angle to see what it was, but he thought that it might have been one of protection, or perhaps blessing.

An odd development, to be sure.

Hobbits had nothing like the rune-signs that dwarves made, and he almost regretted it; there had always seemed to him to be something reassuring about them, about the way that dwarves would comfort themselves with them. He wasn’t sure he quite believed that tracing a rune for joy, or safeguarding, or hope across another or yourself would in any way make a difference, but even he had found himself doing it from time to time, drawing the symbol for luck across his forehead before entering a treasury like Nori had taught him.

The guard seemed oddly still, though, eyes flickering across the deep shadows cast by their lantern, as if discomforted by something, or waiting for some strange wraith to emerge from the darkness. Eventually though they seemed to give up waiting for an unspoken supernatural encounter, and left again, leaving Bilbo to pad back to his cell and prod cautiously at the bag left on the ground.

He had to smile as his eye was caught first by the slip of parchment he saw when he finally opened the bag, and then as his gaze was drawn instead to the gleam of gold.

 _Burglar,_ the note read, not in Khuzdul but in Westron, so that Bilbo could actually understand it. _Know that I meant you no harm, nor that I will pursue this matter further. Accept this as a token of my goodwill, and know that if I catch you again, I will be forced to surrender you to the King’s Law._

It was brusque, and it was not signed, but Bilbo had little doubt who had sent it to him, and wondered again quite what the Crown Prince was thinking. His instinct was to believe this was some sort of trap, though if it was it was clumsily constructed – and besides, he couldn’t _quite_ believe that that was the case. Thorin seemed… well. He seemed strangely _honest,_ in a cold and calculated way.

Bilbo ran his hands through the heavy bag of gold coins, and sighed a little to himself.

It was a nice gesture, if it truly had been made in good faith.

His fingers traced the imperial marks stamped across each coin; no doubt this came from Thorin’s own purse, for there were few others in the Kingdom of Erebor who would have access to this much imperial coinage at so short a notice. And far few others who would dare to spend even a coin of it.

No, there was no trader in Erebor who would sell for them, not that Bilbo dared to show his face in the marketplace, where he would have immediately been noticed and questioned as to how he had entered the city and why he was there (neither of which he was particularly keen on answering). There was certainly no one in Dale, either. Even melting it down and recasting it into something smaller wouldn’t be too much use – as he had learnt very early on, there was fear in the glow of gold. It was a dangerous metal, as everyone around the Lonely Mountain knew.

Too much gold drew too much attention.

He tightened the strings around the bag again, and slid it into his sack, unresolved as to what to do with it.

It was easy enough to forget about it as he finished packing the rest of his belongings, and set about trying to find a new place to stay, out of the way, where people wouldn’t find him. It took several hours of searching through the lower, abandoned levels of the city, and even when he did, he just took note of it.

He would rather leave Erebor, if just for a few days, to be certain; there were places and people in Dale that owed him enough that they would be willing to let him stay, for a short enough time, and would not tell anyone.

 _Better to be safe, than to be sorry,_ he reminded himself as he made his way down the long twisting corridors, back out of these strangely labyrinthine tunnels. _Even if Dale isn’t all that much safer, anymore._

It had been a great many years since he had first come to Dale, and Bilbo had seen it change slowly from a prosperous town (though already in decline) to but a shade of what it had once been. Even the pennants above the Lord’s Keep seemed to blow lacklustre in the wind, as if knowing the grief on the streets below it.

The guards that had once patrolled the northern borders of these lands had long been recalled to Erebor, to watch over inanimate jewels and metals, rather than the people that toiled in the fields that supplied both Dale and Erebor with food for the winter months. Now orcs from the north approached these fields more and more often, burning and pillaging as they went, depleting food stores and forcing those without homes into the city, only to find it already overcrowded. Without the work that the dwarves had once shared with men, before Thror had narrowed his eyes in suspicion from the dais of his throne, there was stiff competition for work, and the wages barely enough to keep a man going.

Once he had traded his coin for the elaborate little toys he had found for sale in the marketplace, for hot meat cut fresh from a roast in the alehouses, for the strange and bitter pipeweed favoured in the east; now when he visited Dale he bought bread and cheese, perhaps a little fish, and left the rest of his stolen silver in begging cups and the dirty hands of too-thin children huddling in the street; now, when he returned to Erebor, he did the same, for the miner’s children waiting for parents to return home, for those who had had their property confiscated or lost to the Mad King’s whims.

Dale was still as beautiful as it had appeared to him the first time Bilbo had walked out of the Mirkwood borders, though, a gleaming white city at the base of the Mountain, the distant noise of a busy place whispering to him on the breeze, a glad sound after so many days of echoing silence in the forest.

He had followed his mother from the Shire to Rivendell when he was but a faunt; she had been called on some task by an old friend, and had taken him with her – his father had passed away the winter before, when the wolves had crossed the frozen rivers and even the wealthiest of hobbits’ pantries had run empty. She had left him there, under the care of Lord Elrond, and when she had returned some months later she had not been quite the same.

They’d never left, after that – some malady he did not understand had left his mother weak and wan, and her mind slipped often to strange, grey places, somewhere between this world and another. At first his songs, bright homey ditties that reminded him of his father, had cheered her, as had the flowers he picked her from Lord Elrond’s garden, but soon enough it became clear to him that she did not listen when he sang, and she touched the flowers for but a moment before forgetting about them, leaving them to wither and die by her bedside. He had watched her slowly fade away for months, and then years, and it had almost been a relief when they laid her beneath the earth, a painful and guilt-ridden relief.

At least she had not been forced to carry on in a world that had lost all brightness to her, anymore.

In her moments of clarity, though, she had told him stories, of the strange places that she had seen, and all those that she had never been able to reach; she told him of the Lonely Mountain, seen only from the back of a giant eagle, and she had traced the pines of a long, golden feather against her pale cheek.

When she’d died, he’d meant to go back to the Shire.

Bag-End was in a trust for him, though he could barely remember it; all that was left was the distant memory of the haze of pipeweed outside the kitchen window, the soft leather of his father’s gardening gloves, the smell of wild garlic growing along path as he padded home, the sound of his mother singing as she polished the small, sharp blade she kept in her glory box. There had been more memories once, he was sure of it, but they were gone now, barely a whisper in the back of his mind.

He’d made it to the stone archway that marked the end of Rivendell’s gardens before he had changed his mind, and headed east, rather than west.

 

* * *

 

It had been easy enough for Thorin to find the most superstitious of the prison guards; just a quick word in the ear of the Captain from Dwalin had them pointed in the right direction. Thorin stood just out of sight, around the corner, as Dwalin strode towards them, listening; he would have approached them himself, but he had learnt many years ago that stories about the Crown Princes travelled quickly, and the last thing that he wanted to do was to draw _more_ attention towards this strange, invisible thief.

The dwarves kept old and strange lore, and they kept it to themselves: it was they alone that delved into the darkness of the world and heard the groaning of the earth around them, the shifting of the stone, the singing of the rock. It was the deep miners that knew those songs best, but the stories made it back, even if the rest didn’t quite know what voices those haunted dwarves heard in the long months spent down in the greatest of mines, or what was whispered in their ears that left them so strange when they came back.

But the stories were passed on from generation to generation; there was a consciousness to the stone, shrines left at the entrance to every mine to appease nameless gods that even Eru’s first children had never known.

“Have you ever been in the abandoned cells?” Dwalin asked, his voice low, and with the dim and flickering light of the lantern Thorin could almost believe that the thief was one of those creatures, beyond his mortal understanding.

The guard looked at Dwalin out of the corner of their eye, and then looked away again.

“Aye,” they answered. “Once or twice, when we’re looking for escaped convicts.”

“Have you ever seen anything else down there?” Dwalin asked next, his fingers resting for a moment on the hilt of his axe. He had trained well under his mother’s watchful eye – whilst his heart lay in following his father’s footsteps into war and protection, Raala had made certain to train him too in the honeyed words of court, and was more skilled at Thorin than coaxing another into speaking.

“The prisoners tell stories of invisible footsteps,” they replied, “though I’ve never heard them.”

Dwalin nodded, keeping his eyes on the darkness.

“Do ye believe them?”

“My father was a deep miner,” was answer enough.

They stood in silence for a moment, and Thorin wondered what Dwalin thought of this whole affair; Thorin had never shown much of a care for the stone-voices before now, nor for the singing of the rock – it was Frerin who had been blessed with the knowledge of the earth, not he. He had stared at Thorin oddly when he had mentioned to Dwalin what he needed his friend to do, but had not questioned it down here – though he was certain that his actions of late would be building to an interrogation from his friends and kin that he would rather not face, soon enough.

“There are no shrines down in the abandoned city,” Dwalin said next, his voice even quieter now. “Nowhere to leave a gift to the Voices.”

It had been easy enough to convince the guard to leave an offering the cell – the cell that Dwalin told them that he’d heard a breath of something living, one of the nameless ones, the deathless ones. It might have sounded a bit overdramatic to Thorin’s ears before he had met the invisible thief, and certainly there was a certain tone in Dwalin’s voice that only a friend would recognise that hinted at the same, but the guard agreed easily enough, and almost seemed a little excited at the prospect. Dwalin promised he’d send a gift down immediately, and then the two of them made their way back to the King’s Keep, a little quicker than they might have done otherwise.

“I’m expecting an explanation soon enough,” Dwalin told him as they parted ways outside of Thorin’s chambers. “And don’t you forget it.”

Thorin wouldn’t, but he felt an inexplicable surge of contentment as he passed along a bag of gold to a servant just a few minutes later, with strict orders to take it to Dwalin, and so couldn’t quite bring himself to worry.


	5. Chapter Four

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't like this chapter. I didn't like it when I wrote it, and I still can't get it to the point I want. I've struggled endlessly with it, but if I don't post it now I never will. So, sorry. :(

“It’s a trap,” Nori told him, idly, as the dwarf rolled one of the gold coins in his fingers. Bilbo smiled, not quite ready to agree _or_ disagree with his friend’s opinion, but his eyes still drifted back to the gold, so out of place in the dusty attic room of the small house that Nori used to meet him and various other less-than-legitimate acquaintances.

Nori was staring at it too, a strange and desperate longing flickering through his eyes for just a moment, before he tossed the coin back into the bag and shoved it back across the table towards Bilbo.

“And it’s definitely not worth the risk,” Nori considered. “Particularly not with things the way they are. You’ve heard the murmurs in the street, Bilbo, and the songs the miners sing.”

Bilbo had; he knew well enough that the dangers came from both sides of the palace walls these days. Disquiet moved through the streets, marking house after house as first one then another felt the sting of Thror’s rule.

The coins had proved impossible to get rid of in Dale, as Bilbo had suspected, though his attempts at trading them had been half-hearted at best. He’d made good friends of a number of the tradespeople there, and feared risking their safety too much to try and convince them. Bilbo had spent a week down in the city before slipping back into the Mountain with the coins still carefully stashed away, and had felt increasingly uncomfortable as he had walked deeper into the Mountain, down past the palace to the dungeons, with them still on his person. He had suspected a trap as he had carefully checked out his old cell, some hidden guard or elaborate snare, but it seemed that no one had disturbed it, and certainly there were no footprints in the dust, nor had the fine thread he had left across the door been broken.

The Prince had kept his promise then – at least, for now.

A little relieved, he had gone next to seek out Nori.

Nori was the only dwarf – the only person, in fact – who had ever spotted him whilst wearing the ring. It hadn’t been long after he had first arrived in Dale, and he had been disappointed to learn that under the King Under the Mountain’s law, none outside of Mahal’s race could enter Erebor without express invitation. He’d not found the ring all that long before, and had still used it with a recklessness then, slipping past the guards just before dawn and padding through the gateway unseen. Erebor hadn’t been quiet, even at that time: once he was past the gates he found himself in a great and bustling hall, dwarves striding to-and-fro, and he was forced to press himself against the surprisingly-warm stone of the walls to stop any unsuspecting passer-by from bumping into him.

It had been a risk to sneak in, perhaps a stupid one, but his mother’s stories of the East had stuck with him far more than he had ever realised, filling him with a strange courage that he hadn’t truly understood until he had left Rivendell.

Bilbo had wandered further into the Mountain, making sure to mark corners low down with chalk, as his mother had told him she had once done in unknown places, to ensure that he would be able to find his way back: he’d learnt that lesson the hard way when he had been travelling through the Woodland Realm.  

The halls were full of people, going to and fro. There had been miners heading down to work, picks slung over their shoulders and helmets hanging from their belts, ready to be put on; there was the gentle background roar of the marketplace, which he had slipped past, not willing to risk the crowded place. There were nobles wearing their beards braided down to their knees; chatter as bright as diamond, but as hard as it, too. Here and there a dwarfling darted, laughing, though there were less of them than there would have been back in the Shire, or even in Dale; he had heard that the dwarves had less children that hobbits or men, though the secrets of their race and cities were kept so close that he hadn’t been sure if it was rumour or fact.

That had been the case with so much of Erebor: even after only a few weeks in Dale he had heard so many stories of the grandeur of the Kingdom, of streets lined with gold and towering columns of marbles, every hall alive with the sound of coin falling from over-full purses to the polished stone floor.

 _“The windows are made of diamond,”_ children muttered to each other, as they played games on the dirty streets. _“And their violins are strung with gold thread.”_

 _“They fish in the great underground lakes,”_ said the bakers _,_ as they stretched out flour as far as they could, _“with hooks made of emerald.”_

 _“They dress in silver steel to sleep,”_ the fishwives told each other, as they gutted the catch of the day, knowing that no one would be able to pay full price for them. _“And their dresses are hung in the finest of lace.”_

It was rubbish, Bilbo had realised as he had wandered through Erebor. The streets were polished marble, to be sure, but were smooth with age; the busy roads had grooves worn into them from centuries of feet, and the further he went, the more chipped and cracked they became. Most of the dwarves were dressed in sturdy leather, and there was certainly no frothing lace: in fact, most of the dwarves were dressed in very similar garb, regardless of the length of their beards. The houses cut into the rock that he saw as he passed from halls to what looked more like residential areas seemed only to have glass in the small, narrow windows. There was no gold, nor any dripping jewels – but for the height of its people, it didn’t look all that different from Dale, really.

What _was_ impressive, was, well, _Erebor._

The size of it was like nothing he had ever seen before: the twisting columns of Rivendell and the lofty oaks of Mirkwood had not prepared him for the sheer vaulted ceilings, for the soaring walls, for the ingenuity of it all. In place of the shadowy heights, the halls were lined with carefully angled mirrors, reflecting the light from dim crystals, which glowed with a phosphorescence that he didn’t understand but were beautiful in spite of his ignorance – or perhaps, because of it. Great stories were carved in relief into the walls of the public halls, and he started for a moment as he turned a corner and found himself confronted with the cold, stone eyes of a great dragon, belly engorged with fire - the same dragon whose skull he had passed under, when he had first come in, perhaps. 

There was a magnificence to the Kingdom, but there was a decay, as well – the further up into the Mountain he went the more obvious it had become that little work had been done in a very long time. The stone houses, built into the walls, were crumbling in places, and the roads grew less smoothly paved the further away from the centre he had walked. Like Dale, this was a city suffering a decline, perhaps more slowly, but suffering none the less. Soon enough the rock faces were left rough and untreated, the houses smaller and more cramped, the dwarves thinner, with deeper shadows under their eyes.

And that was where he had run into Nori, entirely distracted by crystal lanterns and the dark moss growing in the cracks in the marble streets. He had just been walking, keeping to the edge of the road, when a hand had shot out from a darkened alleyway between two buildings and had grabbed hold of him, dragging him out of the street light.

He had almost forgotten for a moment that he had been wearing the ring, and had let out a noise of surprise. The hand clutched his shirt tight, but it was obvious that the shadowed face of the dwarf in front of him had not known quite where to look.

“It was your shadow,” Nori had told him, much later on. “Even invisible men cast shadows.”

But that was a whole other story, really, the way he had fallen into the life of a thief under Nori’s careful watch. Bilbo was more cautious now, ever since he had been dragged into that alleyway, and no one else – apart, of course, from Thorin – had ever discovered him. Nori had taught him all the tricks of his questionable trade, and every sly and cunning lesson had remained firmly in Bilbo’s mind, ever wary of that cold rush of fear that had hit him in that alleyway.

Nori was still watching the bag of gold coins, but he seemed less interested than he would have been if Bilbo had brought him something that the dwarf would have actually been able to flog.

“What are you going to do with them?” he asked, eventually, when Bilbo said nothing more.

Bilbo just shrugged, and smiled again.

It had been weighing on his mind for some time, what to do with the coins, and the only thing that had really stuck with him as an idea – albeit a stupid idea – was to return them. There was nothing else to be done with them, other than abandon them, and even that would have led to some pretty uncomfortable questions if they were ever discovered.

It wouldn’t have been the first time he had snuck into the palace, though he had only risked it once before – the guards were numerous and strong, with keener eyes and a sharper mind than the ones posted elsewhere around the city, and they at least remained loyal to the throne, even if there were murmurers of revolution elsewhere. But with enough care and caution, he should be able to do it – as long as Nori’s information on the inside quarters were correct.

“Still got those palace maps?” he replied, to Nori’s quizzical expression, and the razor-sharp line of the dwarf’s smile grew just a little wider.

 

* * *

 

It was the middle of the night when Bilbo dared to sneak into the palace walls, padding silently past lines of guards and trying hard not to get distracted by the royal library as he cut through it. There was a council going on in one of the small chambers, but he bypassed the heavy station of guards easily enough, and ignored the rumble of voices from within.

Nori had never asked Bilbo to spy for him, though he would have been the ideal candidate for the job, though Bilbo was well aware that he had less-than-legal ways to discover the information that he did, and Nori had never had any qualms asking him to do any other work. But Nori had always been protective of his petty criminals, and of Bilbo in particular, and the dwarf had always shied away from getting Bilbo embroiled in anything too deep.

He'd never questioned why, but he wondered now if Nori perhaps feared him too much - no one could catch Bilbo if he was careful enough, and that probably included Nori, now. Thorin had been bad luck, and nothing more. If Nori let him into those darkest circles of his work, he might find out enough to cause trouble, should he ever leave again. He liked Nori, and he thought that Nori cared for him, but he didn't blame him for his caution. Now was not a good time to trust anyone.

The royal rooms were in the deepest part of the palace, the stone dark and dense around them, as close to the rock as they could get. Bilbo had long adjusted to days without the sunlight, but down here in the wide corridors, the rock veined with quartz and gem, he seemed to feel it worst than ever. He would never be a dwarf, would never feel truly connected to the stone of the Mountain; all he could think about were how few windows there were, how few escape routes. It was strangely Spartan: he had expected lavish tapestries, delicate ornaments, great shows of Dwarven craftsmanship, but the beauty here was from the stone, and nothing else. The walls boasted veins of gem and mineral, bright and polished, long swathes of marble or crystal, colours that he had never thought to see in stone until he had come to Erebor. There was nothing to distract from the glory of the Mountain save the occasional statue, in a niche in the wall - long-dead kings and generals seemed to follow him with accusing eyes as he slipped deeper into the palace. He was forced to duck into one as a laughing pair of younger dwarves came racing down one corridor, one fair and the other dark, in the leather of guard-uniform but with the carelessness of people who belong, and Bilbo could feel the disapproval of the statue even from here, her hands resting in a decidedly unimpressed way on a broad axe.

He followed the route that he had memorised from Nori’s maps to the rooms of the Crown Princes, on either end of a long corridor, and settled in to wait: there were guards posted outside just one room, as if one Prince had already turned in for the night, though he did not dare to check which it was. Soon enough he saw one Prince retire to the one to his left – Frerin, the Laughing Prince, as he was called in the markets, and the Song-Singer, to the miners. He dismissed his guards, slipping through the door with his hand on the stone doorframe, but he paused for a moment, casting an eye down the length of the corridor, as if searching for something that he could not quite place. Whether he was distracted by fatigue or the movement of the guards, Bilbo was uncertain, but after a long and fearful minute he just shrugged, and shut the door behind him.

Bilbo waited several hours before daring Thorin’s door, running his hands carefully over the wood and peering down the side of it to check whether or not it was locked. To his gratification, it was not, and when he had heard no sounds from within for quite some time he opened it as quietly as he could, shutting it silently and quickly behind him.

He had intended just to leave the bag of coin on a desk or a table, but to his dismay he found that Thorin was in fact sat at one of them, though his eyes were closed, and his chest moved up and down with the slow and steady rhythm of sleep. Bilbo watched him carefully for a moment before daring to walk closer.

The room was quiet, and still; the fire had burnt low in the hearth, and the candles had long gone out, leaving it lit just by the glow of the embers. Like the hallways outside the walls were bare but for the glittering of some dark vein of mineral running through the stone, grey-black but shining even in this dim light, and he ran a hand cautiously down one tendril of it, finding it smooth to the touch, as if it had been stroked by the hands of a thousand Princes before him, for comfort or for luck. Thorin himself was slumped back in a chair behind a desk covered in official looking parchment, and Bilbo found himself forcing to look away when he caught sight of the royal seals. No doubt Nori would have had a field day reading through them, but he was unwilling to do so now, not when he had come all this way to return a gift, and nothing more.

“You’re not as quiet as you think you are, you know.”

Bilbo started back from the Prince, his eyes searching desperately for any escape route other than the doorway, which was stuck firmly on the other side of Thorin, whose own eyes were now open, and casting curiously about the room. There was some quiet patience about him as his gaze shifted from one shadowed corner to another, and Bilbo felt his chest tighten in panic as it swept across him, for all that he knew that he remained invisible.

“I know you’re there,” Thorin said next, his voice a little quieter, as if he were trying to reassure some startled deer on a hunt. “I can hear you breathing.”

But he made no move to rise, and neither did his hand slip to the sword at his side – in fact, Thorin seemed perfectly at ease sitting in the room with an invisible intruder, though there was some strange tension around his eyes, as if he were trying very hard to restrain himself from saying more.

There was a deep and pervading silence between them now, and Bilbo was uncertain whether he would be able to get past Thorin without making any kind of noise – particularly if what Thorin said was true. Though, if he _did_ know that Bilbo was there, then he at least was not trying to restrain or find him.

When he ventured a response his voice was quiet, near a whisper, and he took several paces to the side after he spoke, as Thorin’s gaze turned to the place that he had once been.

“I never said that I was a _good_ burglar.”

“So it is you,” Thorin breathed, sitting up a little and running a hand through the wave of his hair, damp and unbraided from some earlier bath. “Whoever you are.”

It invited a response, but Bilbo remained quiet, taking another step around the outside of the room when Thorin’s stare did not falter from the place he had first heard Bilbo’s voice come from. Thorin seemed to accept this silence with good will, and waved a hand at the desk in front of him, and the great rolls of parchment scattered across it. There was some quality of derision to his next words that Bilbo could not quite put his finger of, but he took note of it anyway.

“My grandfather’s latest orders,” Thorin said, and then his fingers were tracing the seal of the King displayed so prominently at the top. “Dry enough to make me fall asleep, apparently. He’s increasing the mining tax again. Erebor is going to be furious when word gets out.”

He seemed to think for a moment, and then shook his head at himself. “And I probably shouldn’t be telling you that, you know. But, if you’re a spy, I suppose you’ve already read them.”

Bilbo swallowed.

“I’m not an enemy,” he replied, a little gratified at the flash of surprise that cut across Thorin’s expression when the disembodied voice came from a different place. Bilbo took quick, light steps back in the direction he had come, even as Thorin’s gaze drifted in the opposite direction, towards the door. Now Bilbo was back where he had started, but Thorin still did not know where he was.

“I know. You’re a thief,” came the reply, and… was that disappointment, in Thorin’s voice?

Bilbo dared to step a little closer to the desk, his voice even quieter.

“Just a thief,” he replied, almost teasing, and Thorin’s head snapped forward, frowning into the barely lit room.

“How are you doing that?” he snapped, a note of impatience in his voice now. “Staying out of my sight?”

Bilbo found himself almost smiling, the fear that had twisted through him only moments ago easing slowly as an apologetic look eased the irritation of Thorin’s face.

“You won’t answer that, I suppose,” the Prince said, sitting back a little on his chair, clearly resigning himself to the state of things. “Can you make yourself visible again?”

Bilbo chanced another reply by the desk, and watched the way the corner of Thorin’s mouth curled up as he did.

“It would be foolish to change invisible without being able to change back.”

“Will you show me who you are?” Thorin asked next, and Bilbo’s shoulders sagged, almost a little disappointed that the Prince had asked. The thought of agreeing never even crossed his mind – there was far too much at stake and far too much that was unknown about Thorin for Bilbo to do that. But neither did he dart for the doorway, though he didn’t think that Thorin would make a grab to restrain him now.

“No,” he answered, and watched Thorin’s expression fall, though he did nod in understanding.

“Will you stay?”

Bilbo swallowed. He had lingered here too long as it was, and it would make no sense to stay any longer. He should already have escaped, from this room and from the palace – he could just imagine Nori’s derisive snort if he ever heard that Bilbo’s success streak had been ruined by him stopping to have a friendly _conversation_ with one of the damned Princes of Erebor. Yet he did not leave, and despite himself, did not _want_ to. It was rare enough that he was able to have a conversation that wasn’t with another thief or a trader, and there was such a strange intimacy to this low candlelight, to the unspoken secret between them, that he was finding himself relaxing despite himself.

“Why?” he asked, and he almost longed for Thorin to give him some real answer, some real reason to stay there, in this quiet and calm place, with the glow of embers in the hearth and the shine of gemstones in the walls, the dusty promise of great volumes of stories that he had never read, with the sound of the harp leaning against the wall that he was finding himself desperate to hear.

But there was no reason that a thief would stay here with a Prince, and Thorin just shrugged.

“I don’t really know.”

There was something heavy and uncomfortable in his throat, and Bilbo found himself taking a step towards the door. He wasn’t careful enough that time, though, and Thorin’s eyes narrowed as they followed him, though still he did not reach for him.

“Why did you come here?”

Bilbo swallowed, and from his pocket pulled the bag of gold that Thorin had left, that had been weighing so heavily on his mind since he had first laid eyes on the gleam of those impossible coins. They were all there, still – not even Nori’s sticky fingers would risk stamped coin – and they landed with a gentle thump as Bilbo tossed them onto Thorin’s desk, suddenly visible. The cord around the neck of the fabric loosened a little, the clatter of the coins quiet in the still room.

“To return your gold.”

Thorin did not touch the gold, but nor did he turn back to look at where he thought Bilbo was – though the hobbit had taken a careful few steps away as soon as Thorin had been distracted.

“It was a gift,” Thorin told him, his voice heavily, and Bilbo found himself shrugging, for all that no one could see what he was doing.

“A gift that no one can use,” he answered, and he found himself frowning as he watched Thorin’s own brow contract in confusion, and then in further disappointment. “You genuinely never considered that, did you?” Bilbo said, almost to himself, incredulous. Thorin truly had not thought of the danger of using royal coin for anyone who were not, themselves, noble – and the naivety in that settled the last of Bilbo’s lingering anxiety.

“Thank you, though,” he told the Prince, smiling. “For not turning me in.”

Thorin sighed, and it was a heavy sigh, though not an unhappy one.

“I’m going to have to ask you to stop stealing from the Royal Treasury, and I really should ask you how on earth you got inside.”

Bilbo found the corner of his mouth turning upwards in a smile again, and a strangely warm feeling creeping across his chest at Thorin’s half-amused tone.

“I suppose the silence is an answer enough,” Thorin continued, a heart-beat later, and Bilbo half-considered slumping into the armchair angled towards the low fire, though he quickly dismissed the idea.

“And I can’t really blame you for that.”

Bilbo’s mouth half-opened, but he stopped himself from saying anything – though, if he was being honest with himself, he wasn’t entirely sure what he would have replied. Thorin shuffled through the parchment for a moment, before turning a quizzical eye in the direction that Bilbo’s voice had last come from – it wasn’t quite right, but Bilbo still caught sight of the bare curiosity in those dark eyes, shadowed from fatigue and some heart-heavy sorrow that Bilbo found himself desperately wanting to know more about.

“You’re not a dwarf, are you?”

Bilbo shook his head, before remembering with a jolt that Thorin couldn’t see him. He quite suddenly _wanted_ to be seen, wanted to take off his ring and show his face to this strange Prince, so naïve at the realities of his Kingdom, this odd dwarf who seemed as lonely, in this quiet room, as Bilbo found himself feeling in the dark hours of the night in his small, empty cell.

“I didn’t think so,” Thorin replied to Bilbo’s silence, and he couldn’t hold his tongue any longer.

“Why do you trust me?” Bilbo asked, and once again he found himself longing for an answer that he knew could not come, some confirmation that he was not as lost and alone and dangerous as he was to the security of this Kingdom’s wealth, some confirmation that he might still have a part of that trusting, gentle hobbit that he might have been had he grown up in the gentle hills of the Shire to songs sung at the hearth, of harvests and summertime.

But that wasn’t the hobbit that he was; he had been raised on stories of adventure, on the whispers of his mother’s failing voice, on the knowledge that once she was gone he would be quite alone in this world.

“I don’t know,” Thorin answered, after a moment. “Not really. But I think you trust me, too, don’t you? You wouldn’t have come back if you didn’t. And there is just something honest about you, I think, even if I’m not sure how best to explain it.”

Bilbo almost wanted to laugh.

“Looks can be deceiving.”

There was silence in the room, as Thorin raised an amused eyebrow, and to his dismay Bilbo felt a heat of embarrassment flush across his throat as he realised the irony of what he had said. Thorin, though, did not laugh, either in a warm or cruel way. He seemed instead to be thinking, his eyes turning instead to the fire, a frown creasing his brow as he seemed to struggle with something.

“ _Kartur,_ perhaps,” he said, eventually. “No, _baktur_. Ah, but that still isn’t quite right.”

Bilbo didn’t know what those words meant – despite how long he had lived on the periphery of the dwarves he had only picked up the basic fragments of their language, and the few people he had known – other thieves, Nori’s dubious acquaintances – regarded him with a suspicion that he probably deserved, and had never expanded on their own secrets. Neither had Bilbo ever particularly pressed them for more, guilt enough at his own morally questionable lifestyle stopping him from prying into any more.

“Why are you living in our dungeons?”

Bilbo smiled, and it wasn’t a particularly amused or warm one. He was almost glad that Thorin couldn’t see it.

“Can’t afford the rent anywhere else.”

Thorin barked a harsh laugh, and Bilbo shuffled his feet, realising that he had not moved in some time, yet Thorin was being careful now not to pin him down, as if knowing that it might make Bilbo flee.

“You don’t believe that I am a dwarf, Prince,” he said, answering again, a little more honestly. “And if I am not a dwarf, then where else would I live?”

Thorin nodded.

“True enough. How did you get here?”

Bilbo didn’t answer that one, and Thorin just shrugged, as if he was starting to expect that.

“What is your name?” he asked instead, and Bilbo sighed, low enough that the Prince heard.

“I am the Shadow-in-the-Dark,” he said, quietly, as he took a step towards the door. “From here and there and nowhere. The son of propriety and adventure. Luck-wearer. Riddle-maker. A ghost in the dungeons.”

Thorin’s face twisted into something almost sad as he realised that Bilbo had moved away again, closer to leaving.

“I asked too many questions, didn’t I?” he said, not quite an apology but disappointed, nonetheless. “Will you come back?”

“Perhaps,” Bilbo told him, as he opened the door, just wide enough to slip through. Thorin didn’t turn to watch him go, and he spared a moment to look at the slump of broad shoulders, the long sweep of dark hair threaded through with silver, the hint of a profile in the shadowed light.

“My name is Bilbo,” he said, so quietly that he wasn’t sure if Thorin would be able to hear him, and then he was gone, before he could hear what Thorin might have to say.

 

* * *

 

Frerin came to find him the next morning, when Thorin didn’t appear for breakfast. It had taken him hours to get back to sleep, the quiet voice in his rooms seeming to follow him long after it had gone – he had found himself desperately listening for the whisper of it again, for almost-silent footsteps against the stone, for the quiet sound of breathing in the dark, but nothing had come.

His brother watched him for a long moment as he stood in the doorway – or, at least, watched him in Frerin’s own way, with half-lidded, sightless eyes, his hand pressed against the stone of the wall so that he could track Thorin’s movements.

“It is unlike you to rise late, brother,” he said, eventually, a slight frown marring the broad planes of his face. Frerin had their mother’s beauty, unlike Thorin and their sister, and even now, when he glanced at him, Thorin could see her in the curve of his mouth, the gentle creases at the corner of his eyes. A more homely beauty than the sharp angles of his own jaw and nose, a softness that hid a temperament as fierce and determined as his own.

Thorin hummed an agreement as he braided his hair, but said nothing more, and Frerin’s frown deepened.

“There was someone in here with you, last night,” he said, when it became clear that Thorin would say nothing, and Thorin was struck suddenly with a questioning thought: when Frerin spoke to people, did he feel as Thorin had last night, speaking to his invisible thief? Not able to see, but able to guess well enough the lay of a room, from the voice of the rock rather than the direction of a whispering voice?

 _No_ , he thought, as Frerin continued to watch him, waiting for an answer. Frerin could see more than he would ever be able to, blind or not. The stone would never sing an intruder to Thorin a day later, would never let him into its secrets.

“Aye,” he answered in the end, knowing that to try and lie was futile: he’d learnt that the hard way when he was younger, when Frerin picked up his increasing heartbeat through the stone. But he said no more, and Frerin’s frown turned into an amused expression.

“Fine, keep your secrets!” he answered, his voice brighter now. “But you’ve enough of them, and we’ll get to the bottom of it eventually, if you have a new _friend_ that you’re trying to keep away from us all. Father’ll insist on meeting them, soon enough.”

Thorin did not correct the misconception, but followed his brother out through the door, wearing as few braids as he dared to. He didn’t feel quite honest enough to bear them today, though the guilt that should have gnawed him seemed more just a background murmur than anything else as he found himself quite unable to regret not turning in the strange thief, or capturing him again last night.

Bilbo, his name was Bilbo.

But Frerin was right about one thing: he was keeping secrets, and he wasn’t sure how long it would be able to last.


	6. Chapter Five

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all for your lovely messages about the last chapter - I know it sounds trite to say it, but it honestly does help to much to hear that you all enjoyed it. More comments always does seem to inspire. :) Much love, guys.

Bilbo wasn’t really sure why he was back in the palace.

By all accounts, it was a stupid idea, and he certainly had no intention of actually contacting Thorin again – despite the strange and niggling desire to do so. But it had been a few days since the oddly comfortable conversation that they had shared, and the announcement of Thror’s latest tax increase had been released: and it hadn’t just been for the miners. The old tax system had at least been fair, if not particularly reasonable: each dwarf paid a set percentage of their earnings to the crown, and though that rate had risen in recent decades, leaving those with dependants and larger families struggling, the discontent had remained simmering at a low murmur, over ale shared in freehouses, and private rooms.

But the new tax demanded a set amount from each dwarf, regardless of their earnings, and though the wealthiest of the dwarves would still be comfortable, any without old family money or a particularly lucrative profession would find themselves giving over the bulk of their earnings at the end of each month, leaving very little set aside for themselves and their kin. Bilbo had been to see Nori only the day before, and had never seen the dwarf looking so tired, piles of notes written in his own code stacked on his desk, the fire in his dusty little attic choked with ash from a number of others, already burnt for the sake of secrecy.

Bilbo had never really understood Nori: there was a crest on the ring that he wore around his neck, the one that Bilbo only rarely saw, and though he had never seen it clearly enoughh to recognise it there was an age and a weight to a family seal that spoke of nobility, however distant it might be now. Perhaps they were a destitute family, reduced in means and circumstances, but there was an elegance to the way that Nori moved, a smoothness to his words, that suggested that he had been raised in court, although his accent was straight from the upper levels, where the tradesmen and miners were more likely to live. He had never shared much of his life, and neither had Bilbo felt much of a need to pry: the one time he had asked, there had been a chill to Nori’s tone that had made any other questions die a quick death on Bilbo’s tongue.

“I am the son of a deep-miner,” Nori had said, turning away from Bilbo. “My mark is that, and I have nothing else to claim.”

Even now, Bilbo wasn’t sure quite what role Nori played in the grand mechanism of Erebor: he dealt in stolen goods, to be sure, but his primary interest seemed to be in information – the closer to the crown, the better. He kept an ear to the murmur of the streets and the whispers in the taverns, to words of contentment and disquiet alike, and on more than one occasion Bilbo wished to know more about this strange, reticent dwarf, and what winding path had led him to this attic, so full of secrets.

Erebor wasn’t happy: never before had Bilbo padded these streets in his own little, invisible world, and seen them this angry. It was a deep sort of rage, fed of betrayal and fear, and he had found himself a little frightened of it all, of those dark eyes and angry whispers, of the flicker of concealed blades in the crystal-light, of the clenched fists, ready to lash out.

And his thoughts had turned to Thorin, when he had heard the words being spoken against the King: how long before something were to happen, before Nori’s network of thieves and spies picked up on the current of revolution – and who was to say that they themselves would not be the one to initiate it?

What would happen to Thorin – to all of the dwarves in the Royal family? Bilbo had not paid too much attention to them, apart from the contents of their treasury, but now his mind kept returning to Thorin’s half-smile, in the ember light, and the laughter of those two young brothers barrelling down the corridor. He thought of the Princess, and her quiet resolve, and of the blind Prince, who the deep miners talked about with a quiet sort of awe. What would happen to the rest of them? To the young Queen, the second wife of Thror, and the opals threaded through her mithril hair? To the stern heir, Thror’s only son? To them all?

And so here he was again, sneaking past the guards, who did not look as alert as they should given the situation outside the palace walls, not entirely sure what he was here to do. He did not come in through the gates this time, but via the corridor in the throne room. He had been sat in the corner, listening to the petitioners and their pleas, watching in despair at the way that Thror’s eyes glazed over in the cruel blue-green light cast by the stone above his throne after only a few moments, clearly unconcerned by the suffering of his people.

It had become sickening to watch, after a little while, and so when a group of official dwarves wearing the seal of the small council around their necks had stood, and left down a small passage, Bilbo had followed at a careful distance, and had found himself in the official rooms of the palace.

Apparently once the council meetings had been done in public halls, and the main council had even been open to the public to observe, but Thror’s paranoia had long done in with that, and now all council meetings were done in the privacy of his own palace, whether or not he deigned to attend. Bilbo had followed them inside, perching on a low table in the corner out of the way, as the small council settled and waited, muttering among themselves.

“The King’s latest orders are insane,” one dwarf said, his voice breaking through the murmur of the rest, pulling the collar of his shirt uncomfortably as the eyes of the rest turned to him.

“It’s true,” he muttered, “And you are all thinking it. The Line of Durin has gone to shale.”

“Hold your tongue,” said another. “Walls have ears, you know.”

As if to illustrate that point, the doors opened again, only this time it was Thorin who walked in, following another dwarf, sterner and more tired looking than he, though there was a quiet sort of familiarity between them, not immediately evident but there when one looked hard enough, some vague similarity in the set of their jaw and the determination etched in their features as if they had been carves from stone. Bilbo watched the careful nods of respect that were given to both Thrain and his son with a raised eyebrow, and wondered how many of the dwarves in the room would stab either father or son in the back if only they had the choice.

 _Was this the world that Thorin had grown up in?_ Bilbo wondered, to himself, as the meeting began. _Where love and respect can turn so quickly to disquiet and anger? Where the actions of an old dwarf on the throne impact the generations that he would leave behind? Where princes must carry the weight of their ancestors guilt into the grave with them?_

He found an immense sympathy welling in his chest as he watched and listened to the mundane matters that precede anything of importance at the beginning of a meeting – agenda and apologies were quickly dispatched with, and talk turned soon to the matter of the discontentment in the streets, though none of the dwarves seemed quite willing to admit the truth of the situation to Thrain and Thorin, instead implying that all was well, aside from the inevitable and traitorous mutterings of malcontents. It was a strange change of tone from the conversation that Bilbo had heard before the royal dwarves walked in, and he found himself even more certain that the small council were not entirely working for the crown any more; indeed, when it came to the matter of the miner's, they expressed that they remained as loyal as ever to the King, as if trying to lull the Princes into a state of gentle ignorance to the truth of the world outside the walls of the palace.

Thorin and Thrain, at least, did not look entirely convinced by any of this, if the glances that they were exchanging was any indication, and by the time a young serving dwarf appeared at the door to serve them all wine Thorin was looking positively frustrated, his knee jumping under the table as if he were trying to stop himself from standing up and storming out. 

Bilbo didn't pay much attention to the newcomer at first, too busy listening to the conversation, which had turned from the impact of the tax to the planned celebration of the King's naming day, which was to be soon, and the frankly extortionate amount that was being spent on it, but there was something about the stiff, uncomfortable way that the was walking that caught his eye as he bowed and laid out the cups on the table, before returning with a full jug of wine, some dark and heavy-smelling vintage that immediately made Bilbo long for a glass of water. Instead, he found himself following the path of the young serving dwarf as he walked the length of the room to serve the princes first, his eyes narrowing as he caught the slight shift of movement in the hand that wasn’t holding the wine jug: he quietly stepped down from the table as Thrain moved his cup to stand next to Thorin’s, and the serving boy’s hand slipped into the long hem of his shirt for a moment.

Neither father nor son reached immediately for their cup, which gave Bilbo just enough time to get across the room, his quiet footsteps unheard below the sound of shuffling papers and pouring of wine, reaching Thorin’s hand just as it was reaching for his cup. With little time to think, he reached and pulled at Thorin’s hand, sweeping both cups to the ground, keeping a tight grip on Thorin’s wrist as the wine pooled around his feet.

To his credit, Thorin caught on to the situation quickly enough: his fist tightened for a moment and his other arm shifted as if in an aborted motion to grab at Bilbo, his eyes creasing into a frown even as he grasped who it was clinging to him. Thrain was looking at him oddly, and Thorin pulled a brief apologetic expression, but his father just shook his head.

“Let us continue.”

The serving dwarf seemed poised to ask a question, but Thrain cut across it with a wave of dismissal, and he backed quietly out of the room, a flicker of irritation cutting across his professional smile for just a moment.

Bilbo became suddenly aware that he was still holding Thorin’s wrist, and released it abruptly, though the fabric of his tunic was soft, and the wide silver cuffs he wore oddly warm to the touch.

He took a step back, and Thorin’s foot shot out immediately, swiping over the footprint that had been left in the wine.

He stayed throughout the rest of the meeting, watching carefully, though there were no further interruptions. Bilbo returned to this previous position, only able to study the faces of one side of the table: he couldn’t see any expressions of disappointment or annoyance, though all of them seemed to wear impressively cool masks of disinterest that spoke only of vague agreement. They were well versed, it seemed, it schooling their features to reveal very little: probably a necessary skill when it came to dealing with the mad tempers of their King.

He followed them out when they were done, and then kept pace a little behind Thorin as he excused himself from the curious gaze of his father, retreating to his room.

 

* * *

 

“Are you there?” Thorin asked the room quietly, feeling a little strange at addressing what looked to be an empty living chamber. When no immediate response came, he walked instead to the fire, ready to be lit, and busied himself brushing an imaginary smear of ash from the hearth, for all that it had been cleaned just that morning, and was as spotless as ever.

“I doubt you do anything for no reason,” he tried again. “So thank you, I suppose, unless you knocked over the cups as some strange prank.”

A quiet voice came from the corner closest to the door, and he forced himself not to start and turn at the sound.

“The serving dwarf slipped something into the cups,” it said, that same warm voice that he had kept expecting to hear all week. “I don’t know what it was, but…”

Thorin nodded, and he took in a deep breath.

Poison. Someone had tried to  _poison_ him and his father both, and had done it so quietly and subtly that they never would have noticed, if not for the thief. And he knew that he should be furious that Bilbo had been listening on a small council meeting, but he found himself instead only intensely grateful - without him, father and son might already have passed in the halls of their ancestors, leaving behind only Frerin to inherit their Grandfather's throne, in a Kingdom which was far angrier than anyone was willing to admit to him. 

He abruptly realised that he hadn't replied, and if his words sounded rushed, and perhaps a little wooden with the shock, then he thought that the thief might understand. 

“Thank you, then. Even if it wasn’t something deadly, these things need checking.”

The thief – Bilbo, he reminded himself again, though it still seemed odd to him to use a person’s name when he had no idea what they looked like, or who they really were – cleared his throat, as if stopping himself from saying something more. Thorin hesitated for a moment, before settling in one of the armchairs facing the fireplace, and gesturing to the other, far away enough across the rug that he wouldn’t be able to reach for it without rising himself. 

“Sit, if you will,” he said to the empty room, trying hard not to make it sound like too much of a command. “You won’t come to any harm in these rooms.”

“You shouldn’t make promises that you can’t keep,” said the thief, but after a moment the cushions on the chair shifted and compressed, as he did sit down.

This was the first time, as far as he was aware, that anyone had ever tried to end his life outside of battle, and the thought of his own life ending concerned him much less than the thought of his Kingdom's discontent - how bad must it truly be out there, for this to have happened? What was he not being told, by these advisers, who kept one eye on their accounts and another on Thror's good temper. 

“You walk barefoot,” he said, breaking the silence as he quite suddenly felt the need to change the subject, to any subject, to get the thoughts of this out of his mind.

The thief laughed, a short, wry sound, as if in on some private joke that Thorin didn't understand.

“Of course I do,” he replied, before seeming to realise what he had said. “I mean-”

“Definitely not a dwarf then,” Thorin answered, the corners of his mouth curving upwards, just a little. “No dwarf goes without boots, apart from occasionally my brother, for reasons of his own.”

The feet had been large, too – too big for any man or elf, he thought, though in reality his knowledge of their anatomy was somewhat limited. “And you’re not some spirit either then, if you leave traces behind you.”

It sounded like there was a smile in the thief’s voice when he replied, though that might simply have been Thorin’s imagination.

“Very much mortal, with as much of a body as anyone else.”

They sat in silence for a while, and Thorin found himself playing with the beads at the end of one braid, a childhood habit that he rarely found himself doing anymore. As soon as he realised that he was he dropped it, and hummed a low noise in the back of his throat.

“You probably saved my life today,” he said, and there was a lightness in his tone that seemed to hide the true feeling behind his words. “And probably the life of my father too. Do you know what that means, to a dwarf?”

Silence was his only answer, and he continued on, trying had to keep his tone friendly, and calm.

“When a dwarf saves the life of another, that life becomes his own. It is a debt rarely won, for Mahal made us sturdy, and strong – you are my shield brother now, thief, though I have never seen your face and we have never faced battle together. You have stolen from the crown and broken my Grandfather’s laws by living here, but you will face no threat from me as long as you remain here. My honour forbids it – as does my own heart. I am indebted to you, for my own life as well as the life of my _a’dud_.”

He wondered, not for the first time, what this thief looked like, whether now he was frowning, or smiling, or chewing on his lip in consideration: for some reason the thought of him smirking in some kind of triumph did not fit in the vague and unspecified mental image that Thorin was beginning to build.

“That’s not necessary, you know,” the thief told him, and there was some measure of concern in his voice.

“It is,” Thorin insisted. “And I also might ask you whether you would be interested in any profession other than that of a thief.”

No response came, and Thorin looked at where he thought this creature’s face might be.

“As a guard, perhaps, for me. And my family. These are troubled times, and having someone to watch over us when others do not know that you are there could save one of us again, as it did today.”

The thief laughed, but it was warm sound.

“You are quick to trust, Prince Thorin. Too quick, perhaps.”

Thorin did not smile: the words were too familiar to his father’s to cause anything but a brief frown appear across his brow.

 _“You are calculating, and you are smart,”_ his father had told him once, many years ago, when he had been much younger. _“But you give your trust too willingly for a Prince.”_

Thorin remembered that he had frowned then, at those words, until his father had run a gentle hand across his jaw, where the beginnings of a beard had just begun to grow, before frown lines had appeared across his forehead and his mouth had pulled more downwards than into a smile.

_“It is not a criticism, ‘ibin. I am glad that no tragedy has ever struck your life enough to take that from you, that you have never been forced to exchange that hope for distrust. It is a good thing, not to let your heart harden too swiftly to others. You will make a good king, one day.”_

Thorin had wanted to protest, for then as much as now he was unable to picture himself sat on that throne: it was his father he saw wearing that crown, or Dis, perhaps, but not he. He knew now even better than before that his sister would have been a greater ruler than he would ever to be had she be born first, and he could not wish the death of both himself and Frerin for the sake of making that happen: still, though, that thought had lingered in his mind as his father had smiled at him, running a hand through Thorin’s hair, still untouched by silver, as if sensing his son’s disquiet.

_“But be wary, as your years grow longer: there will be many that will use you for your position and your power, and not for your company or your cheer. Think on that.”_

And he had remembered that lesson, the one he suspected that his father had never had the benefit of hearing in his own youth, and had kept all but the closest of company at an arms length: his own kin were all he confided in, those who he trusted unconditionally. He had often wondered whether that trusting child that his father had sought to teach had gone entirely, but he realised now that it had not. His life had not taken the sudden turn that it would have taken him to change so fundamentally: instead, it had waited, dormant, and now it seemed to cry to him about this invisible thief, and whether he truly wanted to or not, he found that he did trust him.

“Perhaps,” he said, and now the corner of his mouth did twitch again. “But a very wise dwarf once told me that that wasn’t necessarily a character flaw.”

The laughter that came was sudden and bright, filling the cool room with the sound of it, and Thorin felt some twist of pleasure in his chest at the knowledge that he had made this thief laugh, a joy that he couldn’t place warming the chill of fear that had settled in his chest since those cups had first been knocked over until it might well have never been there.

“You never answered my question,” he said, and bit the inside of his mouth hard enough to taste the copper-brightness of blood as the laughter abruptly stopped.

“You ask me many questions, my Prince,” said the thief, “And there are many of them that I don’t answer.”

That was true, but Thorin couldn’t bring himself to feel any frustration at the thief’s reticence. Instead they sank into a comfortable silence, Thorin staring at the patterns of quartz in the walls rather than at the seemingly-empty chair, feeling oddly light-hearted despite of the small council meeting. He was sure the concern at the attempted assassination would strike him soon enough, but for now he was content enough to sit back as he tried to think of a way to inform the guards about the betrayal without revealing his source.

“What colour eyes do you have?” he asked eventually, and the thief huffed a small sigh of frustration before the cushions shifted, as if he had risen from his seat.

“You cannot see them,” the thief told him, his voice further away now, closer to the door. “So what does it matter?”

Thorin just shrugged as his gaze traced the whorls and curling lines of the rock, the smooth shine where it had been rubbed down by generations of dwarves, the nick on the wall from where his father, when he had been but a boy, had once tried to knock a piece of it loose.

The thief seemed to sigh again, just a little, before the door opened, and closed again.

 

* * *

 

“You have a secret,” Dis told him, quite abruptly, over dinner that evening.

Luckily, Thorin had been preparing for this for some time, and he didn’t think he let anything other than a twitch along his jaw give away his discomfort. Instead, he met her gaze, her eyes as severe and blue as his own, and raised his eyes, as if in surprise.

“Something on your mind, sister?” he asked, and Dis rolled her own eyes back at him.

From beside her Vili shifted and coughed, perhaps trying to conceal a laugh. Across from him – and next to Thorin – Fili was doing an even worse job of hiding his expression. Only Kili was staring around them, apparently at a loss about what was happening, and Frerin merely continued eating, though the corner of his mouth might have shifted, just a little. Thrain stared between them all and seemed to sigh, and his eye fell for a moment on the chair that had remained empty since his wife’s death, as if searching for her still to explain what was happening.

Chairs stood empty too for other members of the family, though it had been years since Thror had joined them, and his second wife rarely left her rooms but to visit the Royal Library.

There was one more chair, but that was never spoken of.

Thorin had watched this table grow over his life: first for a new brother, then a sister, and then for a brother-in-law; finally for a pair of nephews that he wouldn’t have exchanged for the world. But they had lost faces along the way, a Grandmother and a Mother in the same week, and their chairs had never been removed. He suspected that it would remain the same way as long as his father lived, and that he too would continue their unspoken tradition, expanding and adding to the table at each new family member, but never forgetting those that they had lost. It had a strange and inexplicable significance to it, those empty chairs who still had placemats set before them, and it gave him a surge of comfort to look at them, and remember.

“What’s happening?” Kili asked, when nothing more was immediately said. “What’s Uncle Thorin done?”

Frerin cleared his throat.

“I think, lad,” he drawled as he speared another piece of fish. “That it is more a case of _who_ he has done.”

Kili pulled a horrified expression even as Fili broke, and began to laugh into his ale. Vili was studiously avoiding looking at anything or anyone other than the ceiling, which seemed to be of a sudden interest to him, and Thrain rubbed at the frown line between his brows in frustration.

“Thanks for that,” Thorin muttered, trying not to sound quite as petulant as he felt. Frerin just shrugged, even as their father looked between them, apparently at a loss as to what to say.

Dis grinned.

“C’mon Thorin,” she said, looking far happier than anyone had a right to be. “You teased me _endlessly_ when I got my first courting bead, how long am I going to have to wait until you get yours? Since Frerin seems to have absolutely _no_ interest whatsoever.”

Frerin did smile at that, and gesture around them with his fork.

“Erebor is my wife,” he told them, not for the first time. “Every rock and every crystal. I can feel her better than I could ever feel another dwarf.”

Thorin huffed a small laugh at the answer that Frerin had been giving ever since he had come of age – and he was rather annoyed that he had never thought of something similar to knock back curious parties himself.

“Are you courting someone, Thorin?” Thrain asked, with a frown of confusion – and what might have even been hurt, that he hadn’t been told sooner.

“No-”

“Frerin said someone had been in his rooms,” Fili interrupted, not quite able to help himself.

“And Dwalin said he’s been acting really _weird,_ ” Kili added, his voice rarely far behind his brother’s.

Unfortunately Thorin’s unimpressed gaze had long lost to the seemingly unending devotion he had found in himself for his nephews, and so had little effect when he turned it on the both of them.

“What I mean,” he quickly amended, “Is that I am not courting anyone _yet._ When I am, you will all be the first to hear of it, I swear.”

It wasn’t technically a lie, and it seemed to appease his father, though his sister continued to watch him out of the corner of her eye, as if she were trying to uncover some secret that she did not quite understand. Frerin was still smiling, but Thorin wasn’t entirely sure if he was convinced, either: he turned back to his food, and tried his best to school his expression into something neutral.

He wasn’t entirely sure if it worked or not.


	7. Chapter Six

Bilbo knew that it was stupid, but he took to following Thorin anyway.

It was a ridiculous idea, and he couldn’t for the life of him justify it to himself: spending this much time in the Royal Palace, shadowing members of the Line of Durin – it would just make it all the easier for him to be caught. One day he wouldn’t be quiet enough, or careful enough, and a hand would shoot unseen to take him, in the very best of circumstances, to a deep cell that he would never escape from. He understood well enough that the madness of the old King would mean that any good he was doing in protecting Thror’s line would not be enough to save him – his paranoia would ensure that anyone who was sneaking unseen around his palace would be assumed to be working with ill intent.

And yet, here he was.

Nori would slap him around the head, if Bilbo quite dared to tell him.

But someone had tried to kill Thorin, and Thrain as well, and as far as Bilbo could tell they didn’t deserve it. The Princes had little choice when it came to their King’s orders, and could only do the best they could to try and appease the anger of Erebor without insulting their King. The Princess’ belly grew bigger with new life; her sons laughed as they did their guard duties; the Blind Prince whispered to the stone, and Thrain and Thorin tried their best to work around Thror’s madness: none of them deserved a death in the name of revolution.

Though, Bilbo was well aware from his mother’s stories, who deserved what seemed to have very little bearing on the course of history.

He felt strangely indebted to Thorin still, though saving him in the small council should have been enough to wipe the slate clean between them, but Thorin’s overtures of trust and friendship seemed well-intentioned and honest, and he had never pressed Bilbo too hard into revealing himself. If another dwarf had discovered him, he might find himself already under lock and key, but Thorin had let him go free, had understood that some secrets must be kept, and Bilbo appreciated that.

Plus, it was kind of nice, to watch Thorin’s life.

Despite what the upper-levels murmured, the Princes did not live some relaxed life of luxury. Thorin was up before the dawn bells most days, to oil and braid his hair before his joined his family for breakfast, and their table was not nearly as lavish in its spread as rumour would have had him believe. Bilbo had taken to sleeping in the corridor outside Thorin and Frerin’s room, in an alcove behind a rather formidable statue, and whilst it wasn’t the comfiest of spaces, it also wasn’t the worst place he had ever laid his head. It was also perfectly situated for when Thorin rose: Bilbo woke with the bells, normally just in time to see Thorin already dressed and ready, slipping out of his bedroom door.

Frerin seemed to rise a little later, though he always made it to breakfast, admittedly in a much less organised state than his brother. The Princess’ sons were usually even worse, but no one seemed to mind their dishevelled hair or the fact that sometimes Kili was still wearing his sleep shirt instead of a tunic.

They were a family: it was strange to witness, really, but they were.

Bilbo followed Thorin from room to room and task to task, though on days when he was joined by Frerin, he made sure to stay a little further back, behind the guards that tailed them, for he had heard stories of the way the stone spoke to the Blind Prince.

It was hard to tell if Thorin knew he was there or not: sometimes he caught the Prince staring hard at a shadowed corner, or frowning as he walked into a room, his eyes darting back and forth as if he was looking for something, but whether or not he was searching for his invisible acquaintance, Bilbo did not know, and there was no way to tell. It was strange, seeing Thorin like this, watching the way he was in public to the way he was in private, and he wondered how much of a struggle it must be to get to know Thorin, if you didn’t have this insight into him, if you didn’t know the warmth with which he grasped his father’s shoulder, the comfort he took in his sister’s laughter, the way that he smiled when his nephews came into the room: many thought the older Prince severe compared to his brothers and Dis’ sons, but that wasn’t the case when the doors were closed and the outside world was barred.

Would he still have acted this way, Bilbo often wondered, if Thorin had known that he was there?

Probably not.

The thought dismayed him, though he couldn’t explain for sure why that was.

Thorin went from meeting to meeting, often with his father or brother, but sometimes alone: over the next couple of weeks Bilbo was surprised to learn how rarely the King met with any of his kin. Since Bilbo had begun tailing Thorin, he had heard that the King had met with Thrain once, and Thorin twice; Frerin had been ordered to visit the King but it had only been for a few moments, and Dis was called upon three or four times, and was often asked to sing to Thror, though he seemed to tire of her attention quickly. But he attended no meetings, and seemed to accept no council, flitting instead from his throne room to his treasury. His younger wife, Bilbo had yet to even see, though he had caught sight of her retinue once, as she asked them to wait for her outside the Royal Library: all he saw of her, though, was the long sweep of her mithril hair, braided with silver wire and diamonds, as she passed through the doorway.

 _Who was she?_ Bilbo had found himself wondering, when he had seen that.

No one ever spoke about the Queen – not Thorin or his family, not the miners in the alehouses, not Nori and his strange friends: he wasn’t even sure if he had really known that there was a Queen before now. What was her name? How had she come to marry the King, after his first wife had died?

But there was no one to ask, and so he put the thought from his mind, and continued with his new found occupation.

It was nice, to be around people again, even if they had no idea that he was there – there was something comforting about the sound of life in the palace, though sometimes a longing to be a part of it all struck him with such strength that he found himself aching from it. He wondered, sometimes, if the prisoners in the cells were still listening for his footsteps, if the traders down in Dale would miss him, eventually, whether people would starve because he had stopped sneaking into the treasury, and though he knew that Thorin wouldn’t know if he went back, he felt in some strange way honour bound not to steal from the dwarves anymore, though his guilt at those who relied on him often pressed his honour to breaking point.

He knew that he had made no vow, either to the beggars or to Thorin, but he was a kindly soul, beneath his cunning and his thievery, and often he found himself quite despairing at the knowledge that, whatever he did, he would be breaking an unspoken and unsolicited promise to one of the two.

Nori would have laughed at him, if he had heard, but Bilbo was puzzled enough about Nori that he felt unable to go to him to share the recent developments in his life.

It had been his eleventh day of following Thorin, and the dwarf had slipped from him: Bilbo had been tailing quite far behind, to avoid being felt by Frerin, who was at his brother’s side, and the pair and their guards had slipped into a council meeting, the doors shutting behind them before Bilbo had had a chance to enter: it wasn’t the first time that this had happened, and Bilbo knew that Thorin was much more on his guard now, thanks to Bilbo’s intervention the last day that they had spoken, but he had taken a wandering and circuitous route around the palace, trying to find the younger Princes or the Princess, anyone to watch, so that he might feel like he was doing something.

It was whilst he was searching that he caught sight of Dwalin, a face that had become familiar enough to him that he had been surprised that he was not with Frerin and Thorin that morning: Bilbo had stopped short at the sight of him ducking into one of the narrow servants staircases, a little bemused by the way that Dwalin had looked around him as if to make sure that there was no one following, and after a moment, had padded quietly after him.

Dwalin had bypassed the kitchen and the storerooms and servants quarters entirely, following the increasingly narrow corridor down to a doorway that Bilbo wasn’t sure that he had ever seen before. He pressed himself against the wall when one dwarf appeared that he recognised, but he didn’t seem surprised to see Dwalin, merely nodding and continuing on his way.

It took Bilbo a moment to work out where he knew the dwarf from, and when he did it was only to be puzzled by another mystery: what was one of the housekeeping dwarves, in charge of ceremonial wear, doing all the way down here?

Dwalin had slipped through another door, and Bilbo had followed, having to come dangerously close to the guard in order to get through the door in time. Had Dwalin turned immediately to lock the door, he would have bumped right into Bilbo, and he found himself annoyed at himself at the risk that he had taken: however both Dwalin and Bilbo found themselves distracted by the sight of Nori, sitting in a hooded cloak at a table, and he was able to get out of the way before Dwalin had a chance to turn and secure them inside.

Bilbo pressed himself against a corner, and tried not to breathe. Nori was the one dwarf likely to guess that he was there, and the last thing that Bilbo wanted was to get caught.

“You’re late,” Nori said first, breaking the silence, as he pulled a pipe from his cloak; Dwalin had merely shrugged, and settled down in the chair opposite.

 “What news from your end?”

“Nothing you haven’t already heard.”

Dwalin seemed content enough with that, and took out his own pipe, already packed and ready to light.

“Someone tried to poison Thrain and Thorin at a small council meeting.”

A breath had hissed from between Nori’s teeth as Dwalin continued.

“Anything?”

Nori shook his head.

“I’d have told you if there were.”

Dwalin had made an unconvinced noise, but Nori didn’t seem to care too much that Dwalin didn’t believe him: he seemed to be frowning into the embers of his pipe’s bowl, and after a long silence reached once more into his cloak, and pulled out a sheaf of paper.

“Burn them when you’re done.”

Dwalin nodded.

“I always do.”

Nori nodded, and tapped out his pipe, the ashes scattering about the floor as he stood: Dwalin looked at them, as the embers burned brighter for a moment before fading to ash, but said nothing. Nori seemed to hesitate for a moment.

“Are they well?” he asked, and for a moment his face was so very, terrifyingly, open, fear and rage and frustration flashing open across his features, his jaw tight and his expression raw. Bilbo remembered thinking, as he watched this scene that he didn’t understand, that he had never seen Nori looking so vulnerable, his eyes so honest, before, and it made him even more uncomfortable than he already was, viewing this conversation that he suddenly realised that he had no right to know.

Dwalin nodded,

“As well as ever.”

Nori paused at the door, as he pulled a key from another pocket – and why did he have a key to this room?

“The person who tried to poison the Princes – who was it?”

Dwalin shrugged.

“We don’t know. He’d already left the palace by the time Thorin told me.”

Nori frowned, his expression flickering back to his normal one.

“How did the Prince know?”

Now it was Dwalin who looked uncomfortable.

“I don’t know. He wouldn’t say.”

Nori’s eyebrows flickered, and his eyes moved quickly over the room, as if looking for something, his gaze drifting over where Bilbo was standing, a frown pulling at his face for a moment.

“Interesting,” was all he said, and then he was gone, the door closing and locking behind him again.

Dwalin finished his pipe in silence, and by the time Bilbo was able to slip out after him, the corridor was empty, no sign of Nori or the other dwarf at all.

Bilbo still wasn’t sure what to make of the scene that he had witnessed, or who to talk to about it: the only person that he normally confided such oddities in was Nori himself, who was obviously out of the question: he was left instead to ponder on which side Nori was on, exactly, and quite how Dwalin fitted into the picture. The idea of Nori being an informant for the Royal family seemed too simple somehow, seemed improbably given what he knew of Nori’s character: he acted on his own agenda and often for quite selfish reasons, though self-preservation, Bilbo had come to learn, was not exactly a bad thing. Bilbo couldn’t think of a single reason, bar Nori being a fundamental Royalist (which seemed somehow unlikely, given the offhand comments Nori had made from time to time) that he would be passing information on to Dwalin, unless it was for the ambiguous ‘them’ that Nori had asked after.

Bilbo didn’t know what to think, even less what to do. He had wandered aimlessly around the palace until he had found himself back at the council room, which was now slowly emptying, Thorin and Frerin talking in close voices about whatever had transpired within: Bilbo had tagged along after them, trying to ignore the growing unease holding a tight grip around his chest.

 

* * *

 

“I need to talk to you.”

Thrain often asked Thorin for a moment of privacy, so that the two of them could discuss some latest political development or concern, but rarely did he ask with such a look of worry, such a deep-seated resolve settling across his shoulders: never did he ask at the end of the family evening meal, for nearly everything that he might say to Thorin he would also voice to his children and grandchildren, too.

His father led him away from the family rooms and to his own quarters, a place that Thorin rarely went to now that he was of age: walking into them always left him feeling strangely displaced, the ghost of his mother a strange shade that he still struggled to come to terms with.

There was his mother’s embroidered blanket, across the back of her armchair, still angled towards the fire; there was the great opal that her father had given Thrain when they married, marbled like firelight and stars; there was the smell of the soap she had always used, that Thrain must have continued to use himself, lavender and some herb that Thorin had never known; there was her face, but it was just charcoal on parchment in a frame, never quite conveying the true warmth of her expression, the love in her eyes.

He wondered, sometimes, how much these rooms must hurt his father, if it bothered Thorin so, and whether or not his father _liked_ that hurt, kept it close and warm, as if the grief that had worn deep lines into his face was the last and lingering part of her that he could have.

But he wasn’t here to think about his mother, as close to his thoughts as she so often was, and he took a seat on the low couch as his father took to his armchair, her own seat left, as her seat at the dining table too was, empty.

Thrain worried at his lip for a moment, before rising again to place more coal on the fire, as if he were unable to remain still: he placed each piece of coal gently on the embers in the hearth, as if he were working some delicate seam of metal from the earth, or crafting some fine piece of jewellery.

His shoulders betrayed his tension: Thorin waited in silence for his father to speak.

“Your Grandfather is insane,” Thrain said, quietly, his back still to Thorin but seeming to sense his son’s imminent protestation, if his quick continuation was any indication.

“I know we don’t want to talk about it,” he said, as Thorin sank slowly further back into his chair. “But he is. Perhaps for a time I did not want to believe it, but now I must tell you that he is quite beyond reason.”

Thorin said nothing as Thrain made his way back to his own seat, his eyes sliding shut at he lowered himself back onto the cushions.

“It has grown worse, I think, since the dragon, but there was a seed of it, even before, for all that I did not want to see.”

There was a long silence between them then, as Thorin struggled to think of something to say.

“Do you ever think about the dragon?” Thrain asked suddenly, his eyes opening again only to stare into the depths of the opal on the mantelpiece. “I do, quite often, more and more so as the years pass. Do you ever wonder what would have happened to us, had the beast been successful?”

Thorin shook his head.

“We’d have been cast into exile,” Thrain said. “Perhaps your Grandfather would have died, if no one had been able to drag him from his throne or his treasury: I would have been King, a King in exile.”

He glanced back, quite suddenly, his gaze softening a little as he looked at Thorin.

“Or you,” he continued, his voice gently. “Had I died, too.”

Thorin shook his head, but Thrain merely smiled.

“You will make a good King,” he said, his eyes closing once more. “Better, I think, than me. But had you, or I, been King in exile, I would not have wanted us to return to this mountain, to the stone above the throne, to this madness. It is a dangerous thing, that rock, I think.”

“It is the sign of our rule,” Thorin said, finally finding his voice. “It was a gift, from the Mountain, to prove that the Line of Durin rules strong.”

They were words that he remembered from his childhood, the first words he could even remember reciting, to make his Grandfather smile: his father, however, did not seem happy.

“A gift, perhaps,” he said, his voice low in the warm room. “Or a test? I am not sure. Tharkun told me once that Mountains do not bend to the whim of mortals, not unless they want to. She is old, Erebor, older than dwarves and dragons and the span of this age: perhaps she gave us the Arkenstone to see if we really _are_ worthy of ruling the Kingdom we had the gall to build inside her.”

“And do you think we are?” Thorin asked, and Thrain huffed something close to a laugh.

“I think that if it was a test,” he replied, his voice almost hollow with some sudden and inexplicable grief. “If it was a test, then we failed.”

Thorin scrubbed a hand through his hair, and his father smiled, sitting up again and shaking his head.

“Ignore me son,” and he smiled at Thorin, the warm smile that he remembered from his own childhood, a partner to his mother’s. “I’m tired, and you don’t need to hear the worries of an old dwarf. I just wanted to talk to you, that, well…”

He trailed off, frowning a little.

“I suppose I wanted to warn you, more than anything, that things might end up happening, dwarves might end up _reacting,_ soon enough. My father might be deaf to the city but I am not, and I want you to promise me something.”

Thorin nodded, almost immediately.

“I thought of the dragon for a reason,” Thrain said next, the corners of his eyes creasing in what might have been a smile but could also have been a frown. “When I said that one of us might have gone back for your Grandfather, what I really meant was that I was sure that it would be _you_ who would.”

“Me?”

Thrain nodded.

“You’re the only one mad and loyal enough: the only one who would throw themselves back into the fire, the only one who believes in Thror enough to believe that he can be saved. And so I’m asking you-”

Thrain swallowed, then, and looked back into the fire, some heavy weight settling about his shoulders.

“Should anything ever happen, I am asking you to find your brother, find your sister, find her husband and find the boys: find them, and run.”

Thorin had bitten the inside of his cheek hard enough to bleed: he didn’t know when, and he hadn’t felt the pain, but the copper-bright taste of blood was flooding his mouth.

“What about you?”

Thrain shook his head.

“Behind the statue in the hallway outside Dis’ room, behind the statue of Durin the Fourth, if you press down the right hand corner in the niche – no, in fact, get Frerin to do it, he’ll find it quicker – the wall will slide back. It’ll lead you out of the mountain, that tunnel, and go quick.”

“But what about you?”

Thrain reached over then, and his hand was warm as it cupped Thorin’s cheek.

“Hopefully I’ll be there with you, lad. I don’t know if any of this will ever even come to pass. But if I’m not, I need you to promise me that you won’t leave them, that you won’t search for me.”

“Father, I-”

“Promise me!”

His voice was loud, and sudden, and Thorin found himself nodding before he could stop himself.

“Thank you,” his father said, sounding as old as he ever had.

There was a disquiet in Thorin’s chest, that he found himself unable to ease.

 

* * *

  

“Thorin?”

He started out of the half-doze he was in, blinking into the candlelight, unsure of whether he had imagined the voice or not: he sat up, propping his head up in his hands as he rested his elbows on his knees, and made a low, pained noise as the ache in his back from rested too long in one position eased.

“Are you there?” he asked, a strange melancholy settling about him. “Or are you just my imagination again? Just a voice in the shadows that isn’t really there?”

There was a sigh, low and audible and real.

“I’m here,” came the thief’s voice, and the cushions in the armchair opposite him indented as the creature settled himself again.

It had been over two weeks since Thorin had last seen the thief, and he had wondered on several occasions what he had been up to since then: was the creature near to him, was he far, was he watching from the his cloak of invisibility or had he left Thorin to his own devices, disappearing to his own life and his own concerns?

“Are you okay?” the thief – Bilbo – asked, and Thorin nodded, and then found himself shaking his head, against his own better judgement.

“What do you want?” he asked, in lieu of a response, and he heard a sharp intake of breath, as if he had startled Bilbo.

“I’m sorry,” he tried again, and though it sounded a little forced it was genuine. He wondered sometimes if the capacity for trust that his father talked about extended further than Thrain had thought: it was hard enough for him to apologise now, even to his family. How poor at it would he have ended up if he had ever suffered, perhaps suffered in the way that his father had spoken of just a few evenings past? There was no way to tell, yet the thought of the dwarf that he might have been, the dwarves that they all might have been, plagued him, unknown dwarves with familiar faces haunting his dreams.

“It’s alright,” Bilbo replied, and for a moment he sounded a little hesitant. “You can talk about it, if you like.”

Thorin shook his head, but the offer seemed to ease something from the burden of his thoughts, and he found himself able to sit up a little straighter again, ceasing the pained massage of his temples.

“What have you been doing, since last I saw you?” he asked, the corner of his mouth turning up just a little, without him quite meaning to.

Bilbo seemed to sigh, a quiet sound in the evening dark, and Thorin wondered for a moment if the sun had set outside the Mountain: it had been months since he had been able to go to the surface, since he had been able to feel the air. He was a dwarf, and here was where he belonged, but he found quite suddenly that he missed the sunlight.

 _“We are stone and metal and the fires of a forge”_ – his grandmother’s voice there, half-singing, and then his mother chipping in – _“But it is the sunlight that we brand into the gold and the stars that we forge into the silver, and even we sometimes must see the land beyond our walls.”_

What had they been trying to tell him? He couldn’t quite remember, now.

“I’ve been watching you,” Bilbo told him, quietly. “Like you asked.”

Thorin started, surprised.

“You have?”

“Mmm,” came a quiet noise of reply, and now Thorin was smiling properly, if only for a moment.

“You didn’t agree to it,” he said, “last time that we met. You never said that you would.”

“I wasn’t sure if I was going to,” Bilbo told him, and it sounded like there was a smile in his voice, though Thorin couldn’t be sure.

The shadows seemed to ease and swell, like waves against the shore, Thorin thought, though he had never seen the sea, only heard stories of it from his mother’s father, who had once travelled the realms of this earth, an adventurer, as a younger dwarf. The sea, some great expanse beyond his comprehension, like so much of the world. Like this invisible thief, sat here in front of him, so much of him still a secret.

“I didn’t know-” Thorin cut himself off, suddenly unsure what he was going to say. He sat back in his chair, instead.

“I’ve missed you,” he said instead, though he hadn’t known that it was the truth until the words had already passed his lips. He felt the flush of his embarrassment around his throat, but swallowed it back, glancing instead to the rings on his fingers, the stones gleaming in the firelight.

“We always meet in the dark,” he said next, quietly. “Always in the dark, at night, in the quiet, when no one will know. All the important conversations I’ve had recently have been like this.”

The cushions on the armchair opposite him eased suddenly, without warning, and Thorin flinched in shock as he felt the warmth of an unseen hand against his own, a light touch that steadied and remained as Thorin made no move to grab for it.

“Well, we could hardly meet over breakfast, could we?” Bilbo said, and an unexpected laugh forced its way out of Thorin’s throat, unbidden and bright. “Even if I would kill for some bacon right now.”

“Where have you been staying?” Thorin asked, the thought suddenly occurring to him. “What _have_ you been eating?”

There was a movement in the hand against Thorin’s, as if Bilbo had shrugged, and without quite meaning to Thorin’s own hands moved, cupping Bilbo’s between them – it was a smaller hand than his, the fingers too slender to belong to a dwarf, the palms too small for man or elf, though he had already half-suspected that that was the case. There was some cool metal against his skin, like a ring, the sound of metal as it brushed against one of Thorin’s own.

“I’ve found a place to sleep,” Bilbo said, quietly, and Thorin found some strange rush of emotion welling in his chest, some strange fear for the thief, and something _more_ for which he could not find a name. “And food, from the kitchens and store cupboards, in the night.”

Thorin frowned, and Bilbo seemed to misread it.

“I’ve been careful,” he said. “No more than I need, not enough so that anyone would know that I was here.”

Thorin shook his head.

“You could stay in here,” he said. “The sofa is big enough for you, I think, and I can order food, proper food.”

Bilbo didn’t answer immediately, and Thorin sighed.

“You’d be safe,” he said, and then the hand was withdrawn from Thorin’s own, a sudden wash of chill at its absence prickling his skin, and he forced himself to resist the urge to grab for it again.

“You don’t even know me,” Bilbo said, still sounding as confused as he had the first time. “You trust me when you have no reason to.”

Thorin breathed out, and shrugged.

“Am I not safe, with you?” he asked, and Bilbo laughed, a dry, bitter little laugh.

“If you were not, I would hardly tell you, would I?”

Thorin sighed.

“I suppose not.”

There was silence between them, then, and then Thorin started, remembering something. He stood and strode to his desk, and from a drawer pulled a small bag, about the same size as the coin purse he had given Bilbo last time, only when he placed it on a low table between their chairs and opened it, this time it was to reveal unmarked silver. He had learnt, from the last time.

Bilbo laughed, a happier sound this time.

“What is this?”

“I had hoped you would return,” Thorin said. “And I remembered. Now you have to accept it, as payment, you see.”

There was a scuffing sound, like a hand running through hair, and another sigh.

Quite suddenly, without warning or any sense of expectation, a figure appeared in the armchair. Thorin jolted, his hands tightening around the arms of his chair, as the figure smiled.

“What…” he managed to say, rendered half incoherent with shock.

“I am a hobbit,” said Bilbo, and how strange it suddenly was to have a face to put to the name – a tired face, cheekbones hollowed from hunger in a way that made Thorin believe that they had once been plump, fingers drawing patterns against one thigh, thick dwarven trousers rolled up above very large, bare feet. He wore a waistcoat and shirt about that, not of any dwarven style, and a thick woollen jumper was thrown around his shoulders, as if he had recently shrugged it off.

His hair was a strange copper-brown, orange-gold where it picked up the firelight, and there was a smatter of faint freckles across the bridge of his nose, despite how pale his skin was.

He looked nothing at all like a dwarf, and nothing at all like Thorin had ever seen.

He swallowed, resisting the urge to reach over, and _touch._

Instead he picked a coin from the bag and tossed it to Bilbo, who caught it one handed; the hobbit – and what on earth was a hobbit? – looked at it closely for a moment, before standing and tying the bag to his belt.

“Thank you,” he said, and Thorin found himself standing, too, one hand making an aborted motion at his side.

He was taller than Bilbo; the hobbit smiled up at him, briefly, and the corners of his eyes creased gently as he did.

“This makes things easier,” Bilbo admitted, and reached out, touching Thorin’s upper arm. “Thank you.”

Thorin just nodded again, unsure what to say, wondering whether or not he should reach out and brush that one wayward curl from Bilbo’s temple: it was too sudden and fleeting a feeling, too richly intimate, so he just nodded, Bilbo’s eyes ( _some strange grey-green-brown that he could not place in this dim light, like amber near a campfire, odd and startling_ ) watching him closely, carefully.

“You’ll never have to steal again,” he said, his voice quiet, his voice gentle, a tone that he hadn’t know that he possessed appearing as if from nowhere, some weight to his words that he couldn’t place.

And Bilbo just smiled, and withdrew his hand. Just as soon as he had appeared he vanished, and Thorin could feel the air moving around them as Bilbo shifted.

“I’ll think about your offer,” Bilbo said, quietly. “I’ll be gone for a day, but I’ll be back after that, and I’ll let you know.”

The door opened and shut, and once more, Thorin was left alone.


	8. Chapter Seven

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i know i was bedridden for like two weeks, but how the hell has it been a month? what even. 
> 
> also, you can find me on tumblr under northerntrash as well. it'd be nice to hear from some of you about what you think of this fic :)

Bilbo spent the next few days, and then the next couple of weeks, in a mild state of panic.

He hadn’t thought too much about what he had done until he was already down in Dale, distributing the silver that Thorin had given him: when he realised, it hit him like a wave leaving him so suddenly anxious that he had had to sit down for a moment, head in his hands, and try to remember how to breathe.

Revealing himself had been a _stupid_ thing to do, the kind of dangerous move that would lead to a person with their head on the block, and definitely not something that he should have ever even considered. Even reaching out to touch him had been one step to far, crossing the unspoken line between them that Bilbo had been so sure would remain unfixed and untouched. But at the time, it had seemed like there was very little else that he could have done: there had been something so hopeless and lost in Thorin’s expression, something in the set of his jaw and the crease of his brow that had begged for some reassurance, for someone to hold him and, even if they couldn’t _help,_ to at least offer the temporary comfort of touch, of warm skin against your own, a silent promise of solidarity and assurance.

And Bilbo did want to assure him; because despite his better judgement, Bilbo was on Thorin’s side. In fact, if he was going to be entirely honest with himself, he was rather sure that there wasn’t much that he wouldn’t be willing to do for the Prince. There was something ultimately confident about Thorin: not that he was always assured of himself or what he was doing, but something that _inspired_ the confidence of others, that made them so sure of Thorin and his actions.

He might have followed the Prince into dragonfire, should he just ask.

And all it had looked like he needed was a moment of shared compassion, a moment of attention and platonic affection.

That was infinitely easier than dragons.

So he couldn’t be too angry at himself for the touch, and not just because he himself had enjoyed the feeling of warm regard, the reassuringly gentle beat of a pulse against his skin, the comfort of connection that he so rarely was able to feel, these days.

It had been weeks since he had touched anyone, he realised afterwards; no one had even hugged him since his mother had passed away.

And Thorin… Thorin made him think of home, in a way that he hadn’t done for many years: not the too-tall rooms of Rivendell, where he had spent so many years, not the cool stone of cellars and dungeons that he had grown to know, not even the distant land of the Shire, as alien to Bilbo now as the places to the east, where he had never even laid his bare feet. He knew the soil of the Shire as poorly as he knew the rocks of the mountains that he had crossed, less than he knew the carved stone of Erebor.

No, Thorin made him think of a home that he had never stepped foot in, a home that was his, and made up of all the things that lingered in his memory long after they had gone; Thorin made him think of long lost faces that were already beginning to fade from his recollection, a home that smelt of his mother’s favourite herbs drying on the windowsill, of lembas bread baking in the hearth, of fresh linen dried in the sunlight; Thorin made him think of portraits above the fireplace and a bed of his own, a fire to warm himself against, a place where he could walk seen and never have to worry about hiding away. A place that was soft, and comfortable, where he could belong.

Thorin made him wonder, sometimes, if he might ever find a place where he would be trusted as implicitly as the Prince trusted him; even rarer, on cool nights in the hallway when Bilbo wrapped the memory of Thorin’s voice around him like a blanket, he even found himself believing that he might end up belonging, somewhere, someday.

But taking off his ring had been stupid.

Fundamentally stupid.

Now Thorin knew his face, could pick him out of a crowd, could identify him if things ever went sour between them: even if that didn’t happen, one day Thorin might be forced to choose between his loyalty to the throne and to his Kingdom, and a poor thief, an illegal alien within his city. No matter how well they might get along, Bilbo knew that it wouldn’t be a difficult choice for Thorin to make.

But there was nothing that he could do about it now, so Bilbo trailed behind Thorin as the days passed as often as he had before, though it was over a week before he dared to even speak to the Prince again.

He certainly didn’t take Thorin up on his offer to sleep in his rooms, though the hallway floor was cold and lonely.

 

* * *

 

Thorin startled the day that Bilbo spoke to him again, just a quiet greeting from the corner, and Bilbo felt a little guilty at the way that the dwarf’s shoulders sagged in relief, the way that his eyes flickered wildly across the room, searching for a figure that he knew that he couldn’t see; it had been nearly two weeks since Bilbo had spoken to him, and it was obvious in the desperate way he stared that he had not thought that Bilbo was coming back.

Thorin's voice could have been afraid when he replied, catching a little in a tone that could also have been grief, or even anger.

“It’s good to hear you,” he said, and then after a moment, he turned back to the scroll of parchment that he was reading, balanced in his lap as he slumped back against the armchair in his room.

Bilbo perched on the edge of the desk, across the room from Thorin.

The silence was tense between them, and Bilbo watched the way that Thorin’s brow creased in some unnamed and unvoiced emotion.

“What are you reading?” Bilbo asked, eventually, unable to deal with the crackling tension between them. Why it bothered him as much as it did he wasn’t entirely sure; or at least, it wasn’t for any reason that he felt comfortable thinking about in any more depth.

He couldn't explain why he had waited so long to speak to Thorin again; perhaps it had been fear.

“My Grandfather’s _advisors_ ,” Thorin spat, and now his voice really was angry, truly angry, and Bilbo found himself tensing at the sound of it, knowing that the aggression in Thorin’s tone was only partially directed at him. “Have _deigned_ to inform us that the King has become interested in one of our abandoned kingdoms. Apparently he wants to retake it.”

Bilbo bit his lip, a little guilty; it was clear to him after following Thorin for the last few weeks that the Prince had very few people that he felt comfortable talking to, and that he had perhaps come to rely on Bilbo’s quiet company as much as Bilbo himself relied on Thorin’s. The anger in Thorin’s voice felt as if it had been festering for days, and he wondered whether or not Thorin had been waiting for him to reappear, had felt the loneliness of their forced distance as much as Bilbo, if he was entirely honest, had himself.

For a moment he wanted to tell Thorin that he was sorry, wanted to apologise for his absence, but he but back the words.

“Oh?” he said, not sure what else there was to say.

“It’ll be suicide,” said Thorin, bluntly. “And we don’t need the damn place. Our army isn’t big enough to take it back from the shadows, we’ll end up having to draft half the bloody Kingdom.”

“Can he do that?” Bilbo asked, instead.

Thorin shrugged, rough and unapologetic.

“He is the King,” he said, his voice cold. “He can do whatever the _hell_ he wants.”

“Is there anything you can do?” Bilbo asked him, standing up again, and moving half a step closer.

“I need to read up more on it,” Thorin answered, his voice still cold, and Bilbo found himself nodding, even though Thorin couldn’t see him. “Its history, how it was lost. If I can convince my Grandfather of the folly of retaking it…”

He trailed off, his voice tight still; there was a long moment of silence, and then Thorin sighed.

“I’m going to the library,” he snapped, standing quickly. “Come, if you want.”

It was dismissive, and almost cruel, and for a moment Bilbo considered refusing in anger, but after a long moment he too sighed, almost a little annoyed at himself, and followed Thorin through the door and down the quiet, dark corridors.

The librarian on duty startled when Thorin walked in, darting out from behind the tall stone shelves as he heard the door and dropping immediately into a low bow, the fine braids in his red hair falling forward in his haste. He was flushing red by the time he stood straight again, when Thorin made an impatient noise, and he wrung his hands together nervously as he spoke.

“Is there anything I can do for you, my Pr-”

“No,” Thorin cut across, but he exhaled audibly when he saw the librarian start in concern at his voice. “Thank you,” he finished, “but I know where I’m going.”

The librarian’s eyes flickered in concern towards the long stone shelves, and Bilbo followed that gaze, a little curious. He only had a moment to stare, though, before Thorin was off, striding so quickly that Bilbo had to scamper to catch up with him again.

He had never been in the library before, and immediately found himself regretting that fact. It was nothing like the library at Rivendell, with its elegant columns and tall wooden shelves: there was an elegance to Rivendell, he was learning, but Erebor strove for a different sort of grandeur, the glow of crystal-light picking out the veins of colour in the stone wall, carved into high ceilings, great geometric patterns following the lines of mineral deposits into strange and beautiful shadows far overhead. The Royal Library of Erebor, he found, would have been much easier for him to use, too: with the help of a footstool he would have been able to reach all of the shelves, when he had often felt like an unruly child in Rivendell, dragging around a fold-up stepladder that Lord Elrond had had made for Bilbo the first time he had come across the Hobbit trying to balance on a too-tall chair in order to reach shelves far higher than he could reach.

The titles were nearly all in scripts that he could not read, but he was well used to that by now.

He would have liked this library, he thought to himself, had he been able to read the great tomes – and, of course, had he been in a position to use it.

So lost was he in his thoughts that he almost ran into the back of Thorin as the Prince paused suddenly at the end of one long row of shelves, and he was forced to stumble a little in his efforts not to barrel into the dwarf. Long used to hiding his noises of surprise, he righted himself quickly, peering around Thorin just in time to see another dwarf nod her head in a respectful acknowledgement towards Thorin.

He had seen her before only at a distance, and knew almost nothing about her, but Bilbo recognised her immediately – it was hard not to.

She was of that strange ageless quality that the most beautiful of women possess, where it is impossible to understand how many years they have walked this earth – the Queen might have been young, or long past maturity, it was too hard for Bilbo to tell. The diamonds threaded through her silver hair caught the light and gave the long wave of it a glow that seemed almost impossible in the light cast from the glowing crystals around the room, and as she turned a little Bilbo saw a little more of her, the sharp line of her nose and the fine hair of her beard, woven tight and close to her skin in elaborate patterns that fell down in one unified braid to skim the skin of her throat.

There was silver wire weaving through those braids, too, and more diamonds, though her hair bead was one long, smooth piece of opal, lit with a strange brilliance flickering first from blue to orange, and then again to green.

There was a certain grace about her features that spoke of grief, but there was a brightness there too, some repressed joy, and Bilbo couldn’t help but think that should he ever see her laugh, that she would appear all the fairer for it.

Yet still she looked ill, for all her beauty, so that Bilbo was reminded, perhaps, of a flower kept too long from the sun, a sapling that had cast its roots in the shade of a larger tree. But she was a dwarf, a dwarf in the rock of her home, and dwarves did not need the sun to grow strong: what then was this Queen’s ailment?

Thorin nodded in return to her, and she turned her head to look at him properly, enough for Bilbo to catch sight of the fine circlet she wore, silver wrought with more opals.

“Prince Thorin,” she said, in a quiet greeting, her voice strangely strong for a woman who looked so frail.

“My Queen,” he replied, and his voice was odd, Bilbo thought, though he couldn’t quite tell why.

They seemed to watch each other for a moment from across the dark stone shelves of the library, the strange glow of the light crystals catching in the gems in her hair: there was an odd stillness to the pair of them, like the great mountain cats he had seen in the distance when he was travelling through the Misty Mountains, brown-gold and roaring their piece to the setting sun, an echo to the howl of distant wargs. But then the moment passed, and Bilbo paused for only a moment, conflicted in his curiosity, before continuing on after Thorin.

He did, however, resolve himself to asking Thorin more about the Queen later on.

Thorin soon found the shelves that he was looking for, and quickly gathered a few tomes, all written in a script that Bilbo could not understand: some looked like the dwarven writing he had come to recognise, even if he couldn’t translate, but others looked even older than that, some early and archaic form of language that Thorin seemed to frown at for a moment when he pulled the first one from the shelf before adding it to the pile in his arms, and it was followed very quickly by a book whose name was written in Westron.

It was a dictionary. Bilbo didn’t bother hiding his smile.

Thorin was done soon after, but he detoured as he made for the door again, suddenly ducking down a line of shelves just as Bilbo paused to look once more at the Queen, who was now talking in hushed tones with the librarian, who seemed to be pointing something out to her on the shelves. There was a strange sort of solidarity to them, and though they had quietened as Thorin had passed them again, Bilbo noticed that the librarian was no longer wringing his hands, or bobbing his head nervously. He might have liked to watch them for a little longer, but Thorin soon reappeared, striding away.

A certain tight anxiety curled in his chest as they walked slowly back to Thorin’s quarters, and for a moment Bilbo wondered whether or not he should return to the Prince’s rooms with him, whether the evening might just descend into arguments and anger. But they reached the door before he had made up his mind what to do, and with an inaudible sigh, Bilbo followed Thorin inside.

The Prince deposited his books on the desk, and then he seemed to shrink a little as he rubbed at his hair, his back still to Bilbo.

“Thorin?”

“I got you a book,” the dwarf said, quietly, lifting the first book from off the pile. “Though our collection of Westron is limited, so I don’t know if you’ll enjoy it.”

Bilbo’s mouth opened in surprise, but Thorin continued before he could say anything.

“I shouldn’t have snapped at you,” Thorin said, his voice a little distant, but no longer annoyed; he turned to what might have been an empty room, but for once his eyes did not search the shadows for where Bilbo might be standing. He just stared at the fire, burning low now it had been left unattended. “It was uncalled for, and you didn’t deserve it.”

Bilbo found himself a little taken aback, not entirely sure what to say to the sudden and unexpected apology: instead of replying there was a moment of quiet, and soon enough Thorin turned back to his books, frowning again.

The room was dark, and as Bilbo stood there wordlessly he wondered for a moment at how familiar it had become, how comfortable he had become here. He knew this room now, knew the shadows cast from the flickering embers in the wide fireplace and the candles resting in their cast iron pillars; he knew the way that light caught the rock, polished smooth by the hands of centuries. He knew the way that Thorin’s voice sounded in the quiet calm of their evenings, knew the comfort of those few moments that he could relax back into those low armchairs, so much more suitable for a hobbit than the furniture at Rivendell had been. There was a part of him that longed to lie on the stone in front of the fireplace, warmed by the heat of the hearth; a part of him that just wanted to fall asleep in one of those armchairs, to rest his eyes for a moment, without fear.  

Perhaps it wasn’t just Thorin’s personality that made him think of home; in a strange way this room had become as much a home to him as he had ever known.

One night, lying curled up in the nook in the hallway, he had heard the distant sound of Thorin’s voice, singing, echoing through the stone, and it had been almost more than he could bear; his chest had flooded with a singular loneliness at the sound, at how far from it he had been, and as he listened all that he wanted to do was to slip through that carved stone door, wrap himself in a blanket, and fall asleep listening to that sound.

How long had he been that lonely?

He wasn’t sure if he even remembered, any more.

And that was the real reason that he had shown his face to Thorin, wasn’t it?

He’d just been desperate for someone to see him, for someone to know and believe that he was real. He’d spent so long invisible, so long hiding on the edges of a society that didn’t know he was there, that it was almost as if he had started to wonder if he was real, too.

Bilbo sighed, and took a step forward.

Thorin’s shoulder was warm against his hand.

“It’s alright,” he said, quietly, and his voice seemed muffled by the darkness of the room, by the intimacy of their loneliness meeting, by this singularly peaceful moment.

 

* * *

 

 Things remained calm for some evenings after that, but that peace was quite suddenly shattered some days afterwards when Frerin had burst through Thorin’s door, his hands flat on the doorframe as he grinned, his gold-and-amber eyes wide, and-

Then he had paused.

Bilbo had wondered for some time how long it would take for someone to discover him, and in all honesty he had thought that it would be in a more dramatic situation than this: his dreams had been tinged with vivid images of being plucked from some keen-eyed lord who had spotted his shadow, by running into the back of a guard, by his ring somehow failing and him finding himself visible in the middle of the throne room. He had imagined the sharpened axes of guards surrounding him, of crowds turning their eyes to him, of steel at his throat.

What he hadn’t expected was for Frerin to frown, and pause, and then to laugh.

“Ah, sorry for interrupting!”

Thorin glanced at the armchair where Bilbo was sitting, though he could not see Bilbo himself – he had remained invisible since the first time he had revealed himself, unwilling to remove his ring once more. Thorin’s gaze was actually a little far to the left to meet Bilbo’s eyes properly, but he understood, and remained silent.

“Frerin-” Thorin started, but his brother cut across him before he could say anything more.

“Thorin… who is in here with you?”

His voice was no longer quite as light hearted as it had been: in fact it almost seemed agitated now, and his hands were pressing ever more firmly at the stone of the doorframe, his stance shifting slightly into something defensive.

Thorin swallowed.

“Thorin, whoever it is, they aren’t a dwarf.”

 _Heartbeats,_ was what Frerin used to say to them, when they were dwarflings and the King had still allowed outsiders into the Mountain; they used to lie on the stone balconies in the inner halls as processions of visitors went past, and Thorin would describe their dress, their strange hair, their fair faces. Dis used to tell Frerin about their weapons, and their shields, and the kingly gifts that they carried, but Frerin never seemed upset at what he could not see. He’d just laughed, his whole body pressed against the rock, as he saw in his own way.

_We have firm heartbeats, strong and loud, and the stone echoes them, did you know that? And the elves, their heartbeats are slower than ours, and they echo too, but not with the rock like us – I think if I saw one outside the Mountain, they’d be even louder than ours, keeping pace with the wind and the earth and the trees…_

_Did I tell you I heard the heartbeat of a tree once, Dis? Adad took us outside the mountain and I felt the bark and I heard it, their heartbeat is so slow, so old, as if they’re barely awake…_

_Men, Thorin, their heartbeats are quick and light, like they’re dancing. Is that why men live such short lives, Thorin? Are their hearts just dancing too quick?_

Frerin had been so young, then, in body and in mind, and so full of questions. Now he just frowned, the wrinkles around his eyes more pronounced than Thorin seemed to remember them being, as his eyes remained firmly fixed on nothing.

“Frerin,” he tried again, but one of Frerin’s hands had already drifted from the doorway to the sheath at his belt, and Thorin was struck with a sudden fear at the rapid way he was losing control of the situation. He did the only thing that he could think of doing, and reached for his brother’s hand, pausing it in its path.

“It’s alright,” he said, quietly, drawing Frerin into the room and closing the door behind him. The guards had been dismissed for the night, but Thorin was taking no risks on this. “He’s a friend.”

Frerin didn’t turn to look at Thorin, but there was a twitch in the line of his jaw that betrayed his tension.

“Who is he?” he asked, and his voice was tight.

“He’s…” Thorin said, before trailing off, and looking desperately in the direction of the chair, where he hoped that Bilbo was still sitting. “Can I?” he asked, aware that Bilbo’s presence here was not his secret to tell.

There was a sign, from the direction of the fireplace, but only Thorin seemed to be surprised by this: Frerin was already facing in that direction, his feet bare against the floor, listening to the song of the stone as he had always done.

“My name is Bilbo,” came the voice from the corner, resigned and tired. “I’ve been working for Thorin for the last few weeks. I’m a hobbit. I doubt there are any other hobbits this far east.”

Frerin was still frowning, but he seemed to have relaxed a little. Without turning, he reached over and grasped Thorin’s wrist, and seemed to calm even more when he felt nothing but an honest pulse, no panicking rush that might indicate fear.

“I thought I’d felt something,” Frerin said, voice still tense. “I _knew_ that I had, but we just thought that Thorin had found a new bed-partner.” Thorin tried quite hard not to blush at that, but he wasn’t entirely sure if he succeeded. “I _knew_ there was someone around the palace that there hadn’t been before.”

Thorin nodded.

“You’re right. I’m sorry I couldn’t tell you.”

Frerin’s voice was unimpressed.

“You’ve never lied to me before, Thorin.”

Thorin didn’t reply to that; he had a feeling that Frerin would feel his shame.

“That was my fault,” said Bilbo, his voice still coming from near the hearth. “He promised me that he would keep my presence here a secret, and he’s kept that.”

Frerin remained silent for a long while, and Thorin wished desperately that he could see Bilbo’s face, to try and understand how he was feeling, whether anger at being discovered was dominating his expression, or whether it was fear that creased his face, that face that he had only seen for the briefest of moments but that he remembered as if he had watched it for hours.

“It’s against the King’s Law to let someone of another species into the Kingdom,” Frerin said, quietly, and Thorin nodded.

“I know.”

Frerin did turn to Thorin then, despite himself, the anger in his expression seeming to drain into something disbelieving: Thorin was quite sure that Frerin might be even more sceptical once he realised that it wasn’t just him that couldn’t see Bilbo.

“You’re just… _breaking_ Grandfather’s laws?”

Thorin nodded again.

Then quite suddenly his brother’s face relaxed, and something close to a smile pulled at the corner of his mouth.

“I never thought you had it in you,” he said, and his voice was strange, somehow not as disappointed as Thorin had thought it would be, expectant too, though he couldn’t work out why. They stood for a while in silence, their quiet breathing all that could be heard in the room, but eventually Frerin shifted, and reached out to gently punch his brother in the arm, shifting on the balls of his feet.

“I trust you,” Frerin said, simply. “I don’t know what the hell you’ve got going on, and I expect a full explanation, but I trust you.”

“That easily?” Thorin asked, but Frerin just nodded, and smiled.

“Always have,” he said, and Thorin wondered for a moment what he had done for Mahal to carve him siblings like his.

Then Frerin turned back to the fireplace, his voice gentler now, as if he were coaxing some animal out from behind a rock.

 “My brother’s an idiot,” he said, with a wry twist of his mouth. “An absolute idiot, but he is a good dwarf. You don’t need to be afraid: and I know you are, I can feel your heartbeat from here. If he is protecting you, then I will protect you, too.” Frerin swallowed. “I’ve never heard of a Hobbit. How are you getting around the palace unseen?”

There was a laugh then, bright and sudden, and something twisted in Thorin’s chest at the sound.

“That’s a long story,” Bilbo said, and Frerin smiled.

“I’ve got a while.”

 

* * *

 

 And it certainly did take a while, but eventually Frerin had been filled in on all that had passed, and some weight that Thorin had not known he was carrying was shifted from his shoulders, some great ease at a secret shared lightening his mood enough that Dwalin regarded him with some concern for the next few days.

But it had felt so much better to know that Bilbo was at least safe from one more member of the Royal family, and the one most likely to find out that he was there; he hadn’t actually realised how nervous he had been about that possibility until it had gone.

He still hadn’t quite forgiven himself for snapping at Bilbo, even if the Hobbit himself seemed to have forgotten already. It had hurt, he could admit, when the second and then third day had passed since Bilbo had revealed himself, only to realise that Bilbo had not returned (or at least, was not speaking to him, if he had). He had thought at first that something must have happened to him, that perhaps he had been captured or killed, but soon enough he heard the occasional footstep in an empty corridor, the sound of breathing close to his ear, and he realised that Bilbo had returned.

He just hadn’t wanted to talk to him.

And Thorin had been bothered by that more than he was willing to admit.

Speaking to Bilbo had become strangely therapeutic, and he had grown used to his quiet company. There were so few people that he could confide in, and he spent so many long evenings alone in his rooms, and even the thought of Bilbo’s company was enough to ease the tightness in his chest that clenched whenever he thought of those candles burning low, the shadows growing deeper, leaving him alone in the dark, surrounding by paperwork and the fears of an entire Kingdom.

To lose him so abruptly, and without any warning, had been a shock to the system that he had not expected.

The fact that it had come immediately after he had finally seen Bilbo’s face had only made the strange feeling of abandonment that he had felt even more acute. Seeing him had made him somehow more real to Thorin, as if he had gone from being some spectral presence to a living flesh, which had only made him feel Bilbo’s unexpected absence all the more keenly.

He had wanted to ask Bilbo why he had disappeared, but hadn't known what to say, how to ask: it had lingered on the tip of his tongue on several occasions, but each time he had forced himself to bite it back at the last moment. Whenever he pushed Bilbo too far, the thief disappeared, and he was starting to realise that he would do almost anything to stop that from happening.

He was back, for now, and that was all that mattered. 

And now Frerin knew about Bilbo, and though it relieved him to share this secret, though he felt stronger for knowing that Frerin would support him, that his brother trusted him so unquestionably, he still felt a little strange about it.

He… wasn’t sure if he really wanted to share Bilbo, not yet.

 

* * *

 

Bilbo had quite forgotten his plan to ask Thorin about the Queen, but the thought returned full force some days later, when he came across her once again.

He was following Frerin and Thorin both, trying hard not to laugh at them (he rather suspected that Frerin deliberately teased his brother more than normal now, in order to try and make Bilbo give himself away), when Frerin had paused, suddenly frowning, and had raised a finger to his mouth.

Bilbo had crept behind the brothers as they had moved with surprising quiet to the end of the corridor, and with a nod Thorin seemed to indicate Bilbo should go further. He glanced at Frerin’s face as he passed them, sightless golden eyes strangely confused, and agitated.

The Queen was dressed in blue, and one of the braids closest to her ear was coming undone; there was a sapphire at her throat and chains running across the crown of her head, fixed in some way to the fine silver combs that held her hair in place.

Bilbo found himself focusing on these details, as if he were too afraid to look at the blossoming bruise adorning the Queen’s cheek, the line of blood smeared across her lips, staining the silver of her beard where it grew closest to her mouth.

“I’m sorry,” Thrain was saying, his eyes darting to the end of the corridor. “We cannot speak here.”

The Queen simply nodded, but she was frowning, and her gaze was hard despite the fact that her shoulders were shaking.

“You promised me,” she said, and her voice could have cut diamond. “You swore an oath.”

Thrain nodded, even as he tried to take a step away as if eager to end the conversation.

“And I intend to keep that promise,” he hissed through his teeth. “I _do._ But it isn’t time!”

“When will it be time?” she snapped, her fists balling at her sides but not reaching for the slender dagger that  Bilbo suddenly noticed at her side: it looked as though it should have been hidden by a fold of her dress, but in her agitation she had shifted too suddenly, exposing it to view. Opals again, he thought, almost absentmindedly, as he saw the round pommel of the blade catch the light.

“Soon!” Thrain replied, agitated. “The stone listens, Ulla! Hold your tongue.”

At that her shoulders squared, and her presence seemed to grow in the darkened corridor, her voice as cold as ice and her ire as absolute as dragonfire. Thrain turned back to her, as if sensing this, and seemed to shrink in the face of her wrath: his face crumpled in a sudden sorrow, for a moment looking unbelievably tired.

“I’m sorry,” he said, shaking his said. “I’m truly sorry. I know I’m disappointing, but I swear to you, I will fix this.”

The Queen did not seem entirely appeased, but she nodded her head, and disappeared down the corridor. Thrain sighed, and waited for a moment, before slipping through a doorway, and out of sight.

When Bilbo turned back to Frerin and Thorin, they looked as confused as Bilbo himself was feeling.


	9. Chapter Eight

Bilbo spent the next few days following the King.

It wasn’t at Thorin’s request, and Bilbo justified it by thinking that Thror was, after all, a part of Thorin’s family – and hadn’t he asked him to watch over his kin?

It was a half-hearted justification, because he knew quite well that most of it was down to his own curiosity.

Bilbo had always been a curious child – his mother used to tease him about that, all those years ago when she had still been up to laughter, the way that he was always getting into rooms that he shouldn’t do in Rivendell, always pulling himself up to look at the old paintings and artefacts hidden away in those long corridors, as whichever elf was supposed to be looking after him that day tried to find out where he had gone: she would giggle as whichever elf, normally so elegant and refined, would deliver him back to his mother, ruffled and red in the face.

And it had been curiosity, in part, that had pushed him this far away from what he knew: curiosity, and fear. It was easier to ignore a fear of the unknown than the crippling dread of a place barely-remembers, of a people who should welcome him but that might, in the end, not. And he had been young, so very young at the time.

But now he was older, and he was still just as curious, and he was having to resign himself to the knowledge that it might be a character trait that he would never get rid of.

And so when Thorin was busy, when he couldn’t find the other members of the line of Durin, he went and found the King. He had known already that Thror wasn’t in the best of health, and that his mind was not what it had once been: he wasn’t sure, now, that he had really understood what that meant.

There were times when Thror barrelled through corridors like a great lion, his head held high and his gaze never settling on anyone with anything more than a brief glance of distain. His arrogance and assurance was obvious in his tone, in the curl of his lip, in the way that he showed little regard for those around him: he marched from his chambers to his throne room, his glare daring anyone to question his right to its great throne, settling down in the glow of the arkenstone with some singular confidence, and, Bilbo couldn’t help but admit, majesty: when you looked upon the King it was impossible to imagine him as anything else. Here was a dwarf _born_ to rule, some great strength in the stone of his face that spoke of ages past, of great deeds and feats of strength and bravery. The servants quaked when they saw him approaching, and for good reason: more than once Bilbo observed his cold and cutting words, the quake in the fists at his side, whenever something was done that was not to his satisfaction.

However, there was more to him, too.

There were also moments when he seemed to retreat into himself, when the rock of his strength seemed to crumble into fear, and he stuck to the shadows, watching everything around him with a hooded gaze and a strange sort of terror in his hunched pose, as if he were sure that the foundations of his crown were about to fall underneath him.

Some days he was a good King: he listened to his advisors, he made edicts, he spoke with an assurance and confidence that made even Bilbo sit up straighter, though no one could see him. There were days too when he was a bad King, and Bilbo had expected that, days when he listened to no one and cut across the words of those coming to him for aid, days when he threw missives from Dale and the Greenwood into the fire, his face a picture of disgust just from looking at the seal. Bilbo had read a lot of books, when he was in Rivendell: the elves had always been quick to fulfil the curiosity of a growing Hobbit, and had helped him find whatever he had needed.

He had read stories of great Kings, and of terrible Kings, too: he had heard the terrors of Kings who put their own people to the sword, those who ran their Kingdoms into bankruptcy through their own frivolous spending, those whose Kingdoms were long forgotten in anything but the most detailed of history books thanks to their own ineptitude or callousness.

And Thror… well.

More often than not, he simply wasn’t a King at all. And in many ways, that was so much worse than being a bad King.

Bilbo had seen his rooms, the walls chipped and scarred from when he had attacked shadows, the fireplace choked with ash from the papers he had burnt, the surfaces covered in dust now that he had forbade servants from entering. Bilbo had watched him abandon his duties countless times to flit to the treasury, to pour over cold metal and gems: it had made him uncomfortable to be back in there after so many long weeks, and after the first few times he took to lingering outside, waiting for the mad King to finish, though many nights he fell asleep in there, surrounded by chains so fine that they may as well have been nets out to snare him. He had watched Thror turn out his entire council so that he could simply stand in front of his throne and stare, in some strange trance, at the Arkenstone above it, in all its cold and gleaming glory. He had even watched Thror slink past his grandchildren and great-grandchildren as if they were not even there, walk past so many dwarves as if they were nothing more than spectres, some ghostly apparitions, shades of a world that didn’t exist to him anymore.

He had watched the King raise his hand to strike his wife around the face, watched him lift her by the throat until her lips turned blue, and then had left, knowing that if he could not voice a protest then he certainly could no longer sit and watch.

Thror was many things, Bilbo had come to realise: he could be gracious, even kind, and in those brief moments the little hobbit could see the relic of what the King had once been, what he might have become had a madness not taken his mind. But just as often he could be sly, and cruel, and thoughtless of his people; more often than any, he seemed not to care at all for his Kingdom, for his family, for anything but the weight of sapphires in his hands, coins spilling from his fingers like snakes to wrap around his feet.

And people were using that, he understood soon enough: it wasn’t just that the King was mad, but that there were so many in his council whispering words of deceit into his ears, bringing to him half-news and manipulated truths, using the King for their own ends. A dwarf was executed on the whims of one council member, envious of his success, just through a sly word about the quality of the gems on his fingers to the King; another for his beauty, a third for her bountiful line. They were taking advantage of him, twisting an already dark heart, with no regard for the world outside the council chambers or their own coffers.

And the worst, he found soon enough, was what they were saying about Thrain.

That he longed for the throne, was one that he heard often; that he was a usurper was a common one, too. That he wasn’t truly of the line of Durin, that he had been seen muttering in darkened rooms with known traitors and convicts, that he was planting the seed of distrust and disharmony in the Kingdom.

What they hoped to get out of creating these rumours, Bilbo didn’t know, but they were slowly having their effect. Strangely, Thror seemed more resistant to these stories than to any other, a love so deep and profound for his son shielding him for the most part, and often he turned those whisperers away in disgust, his eyes swimming to clarity as he shook his head. Thror knew that his son loved him, and loved him too enough in turn not to believe in any of these lies, but it was not enough: the madness didn’t love Thrain, and cared only for its power.

Slowly but surely, as the sea wears away the shore and even the strongest mountain crumbled to the wind and to time, Thror was starting to believe those lies, believe that his own son was against him.

And as soon as he caved, as soon as the madness and the lies of the council members took sway, and he took action against Thrain, what would stop him from turning against the rest of his family? Those two young boys, always laughing and running around with the guards? The Princess and her swollen belly, her husband with his dancing eyes, Prince Frerin and his hands, so calloused from tracing the rock?

Thorin, too. What would he do to Thorin, next in line to the throne after Thrain?

 

* * *

 

“Where did you grow up?” Thorin asked, snapping Bilbo out of his thoughts: he had spent most of that evening distracted by his growing concerns about Thror, the book that Thorin had fetched for him open in his lap but untouched, and he realised now that he had spent the last hour sat in a contemplative silence, staring at the fireplace.

He glanced in Thorin’s direction, and he supposed that it must have been a quizzical look, because the Prince looked away, back at the book that he himself had been reading.

They were nice, the evenings like this that the two of them shared: there was a quiet sort of intimacy, the likes of which Bilbo had never really known between them. There was the crackle of the fire and, on very rare occasions, the sound of Thorin singing, in a quiet voice. Bilbo didn’t know the songs, or understand the words, and he knew that they were not being sung for his benefit: Thorin mumbled those songs without realising what he was doing, and the one time that Bilbo had commented on it, the Prince had stopped almost immediately, awkward and embarrassed. He hadn’t mentioned it since then, merely sitting back and letting the warmth of the sound wash over him, relaxing back, letting his eyes shut slowly.

“Why?” he asked, but he received no reply: Thorin just shrugged, and turned a page.

Sometimes they talked, too: normally Thorin told him things about the Kingdom, stories about his family: Bilbo could almost see the colour of Thorin’s mother’s hair from the way that he talked about her, could almost hear the sound of her voice and feel the touch of her hands in his hair. His love for his family was absolute, but he had very rarely asked Bilbo anything about himself, and had certainly never phrased it so directly.

Most of the time, Bilbo simply misdirected Thorin’s interest, turning it back to the Prince: there was a part of him that was still a little wary about sharing too much of himself.

“I suppose you grew up here,” Bilbo said. “Did you ever get much of a chance to travel?”

Thorin shook his head, and he didn’t look up; he seemed almost irritated, and a low dismay swooped through Bilbo’s chest.

“No, not really,” Thorin answered. “I didn’t even leave Erebor until I was forty. After that… down to Dale a few times, the Greenwood once or twice, and the Iron Hills with my father, just the once.”

He did look up, then, and seemed to sense Bilbo’s surprise; he had learnt many years ago the difference between the races of Arda when it came to ages, but what had shocked him was the fact that Thorin had travelled so little in his life.

“There hasn’t been much reason for me to go any further.”

Thorin’s voice was definitely more annoyed now than it had been before.

“Well yes,” Bilbo said, starting to frown. “But haven’t you ever _wanted_ to? There is a whole wide world out there, you know.”

Thorin’s voice was a little defensive now, and he turned the next page quickly, even though Bilbo was sure that he wouldn’t have had time to read the text.

“It’s not a case of _want,”_ he snapped. “I’m a Prince of Erebor, I have responsibilities to my people and to the crown. My duty is here.”

Bilbo nodded: he felt a little guilty, but he wasn’t entirely sure why.

The silence came back down around them, but now Bilbo was aware of it, and shifted uncomfortably. They were sat in the pair of armchairs positioned around the fire, Bilbo’s legs tucked up underneath him, and now he found himself watching the line of Thorin’s profile, the curve of his jaw and the shape of his frown. There were tiny braids woven into his beard today, clipped with beads as small as Bilbo’s own little fingernail, and he followed the intricate patterns of them, his shoulders slowly slumping. Thorin had been working so hard the last few nights, translating the texts in old dialects and searching for something to take to his father, or Grandfather, without any luck.

The shadows under his eyes were far darker than they should have been, Bilbo noticed, and there was a strangely beautiful sense of gravity about him. In this moment, Thorin could have been one of the great Lords of old carved into the gates of the city, some ancient figure of myth or lore, far removed from Bilbo: he was so similar to his Grandfather. There was just a weight of their majesty about them, some undeniable shadow of rule in their natures.

He was beautiful like this, in the flickering firelight, the weight of his world across his shoulders, so tired and yet so strong.

Beautiful, Bilbo thought again, his world shifting slightly. _Beautiful._

And Bilbo was always trying to push him away, wasn’t he? He was always trying so hard not to think about his home, not to talk about who he was or what had made him, well, him.

Perhaps Thorin deserved a little more.

“I was born in the Shire,” he said, quietly. “My mother left when I was young, after my father died. She’d been on adventures, you see, when she was young, and Gandalf the wizard – do you know him?”

“We call him Tharkun,” Thorin said, his voice low. “But it has been many long years since we last saw him in Erebor’s halls.”

Bilbo nodded, and looked up, straight into Thorin’s eyes.

He was feeling strangely breathless, and he couldn’t explain to himself why: there was something painfully tight in his chest, making it hard for him to swallow. Thorin’s gaze was too much, too blue, too intense, but he couldn’t bring himself to look away.

“She took me to Rivendell,” he said next, and Thorin nodded, though his mouth twitched as if he was trying to stop himself from saying something more.

“It was strange,” Bilbo said, his voice even quieter now as words that he had only ever thought before came tumbling out, almost in spite of himself. “Very strange, growing up with Elves. I always felt… small. And not just physically,” he quickly added, when he saw the corners of Thorin’s eyes begin to crinkle in amusement. “Not just that, but…”

He paused.

“They’re so old, you know, and they’ve seen so much, and I was there with just few years under my belt, having seen nothing at all by my own small little home and my mother’s feet leading me forward… and it was difficult, sometimes, not to feel… inconsequential, I suppose.”

Thorin nodded.

His eyes were still staring into Bilbo’s, and he was leaning a little closer now; Thorin’s voice was almost hoarse, the catch of it sending a ripple of _something_ shuddering down Bilbo’s spine.

“Is that why you left?”

Bilbo shook his head.

“No…”

He paused, for a while, and there must have been something strange in his expression, some echo of a long-lasting grief, because Thorin reached over, then, and rested his hand on top of Bilbo’s. It was warm, and comforting, and it hurt him a little, because he didn’t want to think why it felt so right.

“No,” he said again, and he didn’t move away, from Thorin’s closeness or from his touch: if anything, he thought that he might have moved a little closer. A draft from somewhere blew cooler air across his back, a startling contrast to the heat of the fire, and Thorin’s eyes were not just blue, he realised: there was grey in there too, so bright it could almost have been silver, streaked through like the fluorite he’d watched the peddlers make small pendants out of in the market.

“My mother was ill,” he said, finally, realising how long he had been quiet. “After we reached Rivendell, she left me in the care of the elves and went on a… a quest, I suppose. Gandalf needed her to do something, she never really told me what happened. But when she came back, well, she wasn’t the same. She was reckless, I think, after my father died. She was bruised and scarred and thin, far too thin for a Hobbit, and she wasted away, over the years. It took a long time – I was full grown by the time she passed away. That was when I left, too – Lord Elrond tried to convince me to stay, but it had never _really_ been home.”

“Why didn’t you go back to the Shire?” Thorin asked, and Bilbo bit his lower lip: for the first time since this conversation had started Thorin glanced away, only for a moment, looking down at his mouth.

Bilbo’s voice hitched, for a moment.

“I always meant to,” he said. “I always did. But first I wanted to wander through the wilds for a little, stretch my legs, and then I ended up in the Misty Mountains, following old goat tracks and shepherd routes, not really going anywhere, just wandering. I couldn’t bring myself to turn around and go back West… and I found caves and watched the stars and hid from goblins, I heard wargs and lions roaring and nearly caught my death from cold and eating rabbit that I hadn’t cooked properly, I met the strangest creatures and riddled in the dark…”

Thorin was smiling now, smiling properly, and Bilbo ducked his head for a moment, a little embarrassed.

“You’ve been so far,” Thorin said, and was his thumb stroking Bilbo’s palm, or was it just that he had moved, his hand had shifted? “And seen so much. How did you end up here?”

Bilbo swallowed.

“I went up the Misty Mountains,” he said, “And then I climbed down the other side – I nearly fell down a scree of rock at one point, I was holding on with my hands and I honestly thought I was going to die – and then I was down at the bottom, in these strange plains, and I had no idea what I was doing-”

And Bilbo laughed then, despite the intensity of the conversation, despite the flutter in his chest, because thinking back on it he couldn’t even comprehend how _stupid_ he’d been, wandering over the Mountains with nothing but a small pack on his back and his mother’s old sword, no idea what he was doing or where he was going, but then Thorin was staring at him with that smile still, with some strange sort of _wonder_ in his gaze, as if all of Bilbo’s stupidity was something inspiring, something worthy of respect.

“Stop looking at me like that,” he said, his voice so quiet that it might have been a whisper, and Thorin’s thumb was definitely moving against Bilbo’s palm now, gentle and soft, the touch barely there, and-

“How am I looking at you?” Thorin asked, and how had they ended up so close together? Bilbo couldn’t remember them moving so close.

“Like _that,_ ” Bilbo answered, and he could feel Thorin’s breath against his cheek. “Like you’re…”

There was a shudder in Thorin’s breath.

“Your stories are wonderful,” he said, and Bilbo was smiling again, at that, because who had he ever really had the opportunity to tell these stories to?

And Thorin’s eyes were so bright, so brilliant, and-

There was a knock on the door.

They startled away from each other just as the door opened and Frerin strode through, grinning widely, not waiting for Thorin to call out.

 

* * *

 

 

Bilbo still wasn’t sure what to make of Frerin.

He had said very little to Bilbo since he had initially found out about him several weeks ago, when Bilbo had recounted to him all that had gone on since Thorin had first found out about him, and whilst he had accepted Bilbo’s presence and Thorin’s decision without question or too much hesitance, Bilbo had been expecting more of a reaction, some mistrust, some aggression, perhaps… if not immediately, perhaps, then at least at some point when the two of them were left alone.

He’d been almost nervous, if he was going to be honest.

But it hadn’t come: Frerin had simply taken to watching him, in his own, sightless way. Now that he knew who Bilbo was, now that he knew Bilbo’s heartbeat and the pace of his quiet feet, he was able to follow him. Many a time Bilbo had been padding around, only to find that Frerin’s sightless eyes were tracing the direction of his route.

He liked Frerin – it was impossible not to, really. The Prince was full of good humour and bright laughter, was always there to tease his nephews and to pick them up whenever they had managed to knock themselves down; Bilbo watched him go on food runs to the kitchens for his sister, having to ask servants once he was there to make whatever it was that Dis was currently craving (and the food was something that Bilbo watched carefully, despite the noticeable increase of guard presence around the servants quarters in the last couple of months).

He was gentle, and he was fun, and he was almost startlingly intuitive at times.

And more than any of that, Frerin seemed… careful. Yes, Bilbo thought, careful was the best way to describe Thorin’s younger brother. He listened, and he paid attention, and his loud laughter and overt friendliness masked something that was much more cautious.

He didn’t trust his friends, Bilbo thought, not in the way that Thorin did. Perhaps he was simply more wary a person, perhaps his sightlessness had left him having to think more about the way that people spoke to him, the way that people reacted around him. Frerin had many friends, many people that stopped and talked to him and came to him with their problems, but he didn’t expect too much from them in turn: Thorin had so few people that he trusted, and Bilbo thought that the Prince would do anything that he could for them, without reason or ration: but in turn he expected the same from them.

It made Bilbo wonder, a little, what would happen to the Princes should any ill ever befall them, should they ever be reduced so much in circumstances that they had to interact with people more, that they had to learn the truth of disappointment that comes with prolonged exposure to the world. Frerin, Bilbo thought, would react better: he expected less from people than Thorin did, whereas the older Prince was too quick to believe the best in people, despite his distance and how wary he was of befriending most people. He would end up disappointed from how little so many were willing to give to strangers, if he were ever left in such a situation.

What would the third Durin be like, Bilbo had thought to himself, from time to time. How would the Princess Dis respond to people, respond to him?

The only time that he had Frerin had ever had much of a conversation, Bilbo had been left thinking hard – and it had been, in part, what had inspired his curiosity when it came to Thror.

He had been watching Thorin, who had been called into the throne room by Thror, for something which had turned out to be quite meaningless: Thorin had been commanded to follow his Grandfather away, no doubt to the treasury, and it was only as Bilbo had hovered, and wondered where he should go next, that he realised that Frerin was also in the room, standing so quietly in the shadows that Bilbo hadn’t even noticed that he was there.

Bilbo had watched him as the room had slowly emptied, padding slowly towards the doors himself, letting them shut with only the two of inside: he was learning, slowly, how to trick Frerin into believing that he was gone.

Hehad  watched the way that Frerin’s fingers skimmed across the wall, pausing for a long moment before he strode out, and into the main body of the Hall. Above him were the high, vaulted ceilings of the throne room, the great archways left in near shadows: Thror kept the light to a minimum, preferring instead to peer at his council members in the glow of the great Arkenstone positioned above him.

And speaking of which…

Frerin had paused in front of the throne, staring intently up at it, those haunting golden eyes fixed, his hands flexing at his sides.

He had been frowning, Bilbo saw, as he had crept closer; it was a rare sight.

“It’s a funny thing,” Frerin had said, his voice suddenly loud in the silence of the room. “A very funny thing, really. Growing up, a lot of people thought that I was a little simple. There he goes, the blind Prince, good for a laugh but not for much else.”

Bilbo had bit his lip.

“But it’s good, really,” Frerin had continued, the corners of his mouth twitching upwards. “When people think that you are simple, they don’t worry about keeping things hidden from you. When you’re blind people start to assume that the rest of your senses are useless, too. No one ever tries to keep their voice down, or tuck secrets away when you walk through the door.”

He had turned then, looking straight at where Bilbo had been standing.

“And when people _do_ try and hide for you, they always underestimate your ability.”

Bilbo had ducked his head, a little embarrassed, but Frerin was smiling a little more now.

“Sorry,” Bilbo offered. “Did I get even close to tricking you?”

Frerin had barked a laugh.

“Not even close. I cut holes out of the soles of my boots _years_ ago, you know. I am always touching the stone, even if I am away from the walls.”

Bilbo nodded, smiling a little himself now; he should have known better, really.

Frerin had turned back towards the throne, his smile slipping away; the blue-green light that emanated from the stone above it cast a strange light on him, turning the white-gold of his blind eyes into something eerie, something uncomfortable to look for too long. Bilbo glanced away, up at the stone itself, barely repressing a shudder that ran down his spine – a very different shudder to the one he would feel in a week’s time, sat alone in Thorin’s rooms, talking about his past.

“What is it?” he had asked, after a long moment of silence.

“A curse, really,” Frerin answered, after a long pause. “I think my father knows that, even if he has never said anything to me about it.”

“He might have mentioned it to Thorin though,” Frerin continued, after a brief moment of silence, an offhand comment: Bilbo almost missed the strange sort of disappointment in his tone, as if he was resigned to the fact that his father would always go to Thorin first, that he was resigned to always being the second son, the contingent Prince, the spare.

It was subtle, but it was there.

Bilbo wasn’t sure what to say to that, and soon after Frerin had shrugged, throwing his arms up in the air and turning away from the glow of it.

“It’s a stone,” he had answered, “at the end of the day. And to some people it is more than that.” His voice swelled in a mockery of pride then, the corners of his mouth lifting bitterly. “To my Grandfather, it is a symbol of his right to rule, the proof that the Line of Durin remains strong and proud.”

His voice grew quieter then.

“To my grandmother, it was a symbol too, but of the downfall of our line. She saw the effect that it had on my Grandfather the moment he first grasped it, and told him that it was sent to test us, and that he was failing. She’s dead now, but her daughter tried to convince Thror of the same thing, my father’s sister – she’s gone now, too.”

He sighed.

“The women of our line have always been smarter than the rest of us,” he had said, his shoulders slumping.

“What do you think it is?” Bilbo had asked then, and Frerin had turned to him, his movement so sure that for a moment Bilbo had to check for his ring, to make sure that it was still in place, despite the fact that Frerin wouldn’t have been able to see him even if it was in place.

“Me?” Frerin asked, turning away, back towards the door. “I’m just the daft blind Prince, remember? I don’t know anything at all.”

“I never thought that,” Bilbo had called after him, spinning on his heel. “Ever. And I was watching you for quite a while, you know.”

Frerin had glanced back over his shoulder, and there was something of a true smile dancing around his face now.

“Thank you,” he had said, his face for a moment pulling into something uncertain, as if Bilbo had surprised him. “And I’ll tell you one thing,” he had said finally, as he strode away from the throne, from the stone, from the burglar who didn’t belong. “I don’t know why it came into our hands, but I do know stone, better than any other dwarf in my family. And it has always felt wrong to me.”

 

* * *

 

 

Frerin was laughing at them now, Bilbo could tell, though he wasn’t sure what the younger Prince had felt in the stone to leave him so amused. But since he could feel his own heartbeat bursting against his ribcage as if it was trying to escape, it probably wasn’t too hard to make an educated guess.

“ _So_ sorry for interrupting,” Frerin said, something of a leer in his tone that Bilbo definitely did not want to think about. “But there is news from our Grandfather.”

Thorin stood up, and Bilbo’s breath hitched as Thorin passed by him, the warmth of his body close enough to be felt.

“What is it?” he asked, and Frerin sighed, rubbing at his forehead.

“You’re not going to like it,” he told his older brother, who rolled his eyes.

“I’m not surprised. Go on?”

“Grandfather has commanded our presence tomorrow morning,” Frerin said, and the laughter in his tone was gone now. “He is making an official announcement to the court, and he has demanded that all of us are there to witness it.”

Thorin’s voice was low.

“Then he hasn’t listened to any of the reports we’ve sent him?”

Frerin shrugged.

“We don’t know what it is about, yet.”

Thorin laughed, and it wasn’t a pleasant sound.

 

* * *

 

 

Bilbo spent the night sleeping restlessly in the hallway, his dreams punctuated by the sound of battle, and Thorin’s face too close to his. He woke long before the dawn, haunted by the lingering sensation of a mouth against his throat, and sat hunched up until he could wait no more, and headed down to the throne room.

He sat, tucked into a corner, feeling lacklustre as he watched various people begin to arrive – council members, army officers, guardsmen and nobility: the princess arrived, chivvying her sons and husband in front of her. Thrain strode in shortly before the Queen, whose expression was blank and closed as she took her position on one side of the throne, her hands pale and clasped in front of her.

Thrain himself looked grim, and he was shaking.

Thorin came soon enough, and Frerin too, and it was probably only Bilbo that noticed the way that Frerin tugged quickly on Thorin’s sleeve, nodding just once, as if to confirm something within the hall.

Bilbo stood up, and carefully padded around, until he was closer to the dais.

The throne room fell silent as Thror arrived, wrapped in great robes that trailed behind him, lined in lynx fur. The crown seemed to sit heavy on his head today, as the King’s head was bowed, and his shoulders were slumped forward. He glanced up at the Arkenstone as he approached the throne, but that was all: he didn’t look at his family, at his advisors, at anyone at all.

His fist flexed on the arm of the throne as he settled into it, just for a moment, and then he nodded.

Forward strode his Speaker, the dwarf glanced around himself anxiously, as if well aware that what he was about to say would not prove to be the most popular.

He cleared his throat.

“I, King Thror, son of Dain, King of Durin’s Folk and the Kingdom of Erebor, have summoned you here to witness the word and law of the King.”

The Speaker paused, and the King scowled.

“Our Kingdom is at its strongest and proudest, and I have decided that it is high time to retake the great jewel of our people that is Khazad-dum.”

There was a ripple of sound from around the throne room, discontent and excitement muddled together, and Bilbo took a careful step backwards, away from the crowd, who were now all turning to each other, muttering under their breath.

“For many years,” the Speaker continued, now starting to sweat uncomfortably; he had to pitch his voice louder for it to carry, and it made him sound anxious. “We have let the Dwarrowdelf languish in the hold of scum, have let the great halls of our ancestors grow cold. It is time to return, to relight the fires, to cast out the enemy and make our kin proud!”

His words were strong, but the assembled crowd did not convince: Bilbo glanced over to the door, only to see several dwarfs slip out, clearly dismayed.

“We will do this for our pride, for the sake of our name and our line! There are riches beyond anything that Erebor can offer in Khazad-dum, wealth beyond compare, and it will be ours again!”

The Speaker was practically having to yell now, and from his position he saw Dis reach out and take hold of Thorin’s wrist, squeezing it tightly for a moment.

“Every dwarf over the age of maturity who is not in a reserved occupation will be required to serve the King’s army in this endeavour!”

The young Princes, Bilbo thought – Fili and Kili. They were far enough along the line of succession that they would be expected to go to war, but they were so young still – they still bickered and barged into each other as ran along the corridors, for Eru’s sake!

The noise in the hall was growing louder, but Thror did nothing to try and stop it – he didn’t even seem to register the discontent around him, staring blankly down at his rings instead, barely listening to the commotion around him.

But then there was a sudden hush, the sound falling to nothing around them, the wave of it seeming to wash over Bilbo, leaving him suddenly chill.

What had happened?

He craned his neck to see.

In front of the throne, stood Thrain, looking so tired that he might have been the same age of his father all of a sudden. But there was a surety in the way that he was standing, firm and true, as if he had always know that this would end up here, that he would be left in this position, standing in front of his King and his father.

His hands, at his side, were in fists.

“My King!” he called out, and Thror finally looked up, his face falling into a frown as he caught site of his child before him.

“My King,” Thrain said again, his voice a little quieter now, almost pleading. “Father, I cannot stand by without asking you to change your mind.”

Thror stirred, sitting up straighter.

“Son,” he replied, his voice hoarse, almost as if he was in pain. “Stand down.”

Thrain shook his head.

“I can’t. What you are proposing – it is madness. Our armies will not break the walls of Khazad-dum, we will lose countless dwarves for the sake of stories of gold and mithril! We don’t even know what is left in there!”

“This is treason!” came the shrieking voice of one advisor, but the look that Thrain shot him was cold and hard enough to silence him, at least for now.

“You cannot do this,” Thrain said, looking as much like a King as his father, for all that he stood in a plain tunic, with no crown on his brown.

He shook his head. “I beg you,” he said, his voice catching. “You cannot retake Khazad-dum. It is madness.”

At that last word Thror stood, suddenly, the broad length of his shoulders immediately imposing, the wrath on his face clear.

“You dare!” he yelled into the silence. “You dare stand before me and question my word! I am King!”

Thrain did not back down, and he didn’t cower: he stared back at Thror, calm still.

“My King would not condemn over half in Kingdom in search of a fool’s promise.”

It was only then that Bilbo glanced at Thorin, at the suddenly pale fear on his face, at the horror and realisation on his face: this had been what his father was talking about, those weeks ago in his room, when he had warned Thorin not to act rashly, to stand back and to protect his siblings. But Bilbo did not realise this: he did not know what was going on behind that pained expression, and he tore his eyes from Thorin, back to the scene before them.

Thror was shaking.

“I will give you one chance,” the King warned, “to revoke what you have said. Get to your knees and beg by forgiveness, and I will allow you to return to my side.”

There was a deep grief tied up in the rage in his voice, the love for his son warring with his anger: there was a fleeting regret across Thrain’s face, as if he recognised this, as if he knew that what he was doing would break the fragile bond left between him and his father, but then he shook his head.

“I can’t,” he said, his voice so low that Bilbo had to struggle to hear him.

“I oppose the King’s word,” he announced, louder now, his voice carrying all around the room, weighed with such assurance that it kept the silence, held the tongue of all those present. “I cannot stand by silently whilst he leads the Kingdom to death.”

There was a long silence, so tense that Bilbo felt he might be able to cut it, and almost wished that he could, just to ease the fear that had taken him in a cold grip.

Dis’ face was still, as if she could not process what was happening; a line of blood fell from Frerin’s closed fists to the floor. Kili was looking away, looking to his brother, who was staring at the ceiling, as if trying to calm himself.

“This is an act of treason,” Thror told his son, “And I cannot let it stand just because you are my kin.”

He waved to the room, to the guardsmen standing around.

“Arrest him,” he said, and the guards surged forwards.

“No,” Dis whispered, so quietly that only her family, and Bilbo, were standing close enough to hear her.

Thrain did not protest, nor did he struggle, and the guards themselves seemed almost hesitant to touch him; they moved him gently, leading him away from the throne.

“Take him to the deepest cell,” Thror said, slumping back into his throne. “Take him away.”


	10. Chapter Nine

What would his mother have done, in this situation?

The thought echoed silently around Bilbo’s mind, an unhelpful question, because the older that he had grown the more he had been forced to reconcile himself with the fact that he hadn’t truly known his mother, not in the way that most people knew the ones that raised them. There had been so much in her life that she had never confessed, least of all to her son, a strange and lonely boy in a house full of Elves that had never belonged, not really. He had once known the joy of her smile, the brightness of her eyes, the gentleness of her touch, but even now that was fading, as memories are wont to do, leaving him more alone than he had ever been – at least, he supposed, until he had met Thorin.

Thrain was imprisoned, with no visitors allowed, and his family were acting as if they were in mourning, which Bilbo supposed that they were, really. Thorin had stared long into the fire after they had been allowed back to their quarters, sitting in silence with a peculiar look about his face, somewhere between resignation and fear. Bilbo had not quite dared to break the silence, had simply sat by his side and tried to offer him what comfort he could through quiet company, but he wasn’t sure that it had really had any impact.

Was Thror’s mind truly beyond redemption?

Was the mad old King really so lost to them all that he could not be reached?

It seemed so, at least for now: he overheard the servants talking, whispering to each other about the Princess Dis, who had spent hours on her knees before her Grandfather, pleading with him to release Thrain: he had not been swayed, and had eventually sent her away when he had grown tired of her.

He had seen her when she left the throne room, after Thorin had fallen into an uneasy sleep and Bilbo had taken a meandering route through the palace, unsure where he was really going. She had been pale, and drawn, but she had not been crying: rather, there was a look of abject determination etched across her features, so firm that she might have been carved of stone, in that odd and quiet moment, her features lit only by the dim glow of the phosphorescent crystals overhead, strange and beautiful.

He felt with a keenness that he had never known before that he must do something, yet he did not know what there was for him to do.

Perhaps his mother might have sprung Thrain from the dungeons, wrapped Thorin in a travelling cloak and smuggled the whole line of Durin out of this damned mountain – when he was a child he had often imagined her as the greatest of adventurers, performing daring deeds, defying great evil in the face of little hope, inspiring stories and songs across the world. But then he had travelled the world, and had learnt that no one remembered the name of Belladonna Baggins except himself, a few Elves, and an old wizard. He doubted now that his mother would have known what to do any more than he did now.

It was a hopeless situation.

There was a mad King hell bent on war; there was a Kingdom that sent people to try and poison Princes; there were advisors who cared not for the feelings of the many and only for the cares of their own solitary few; there was a stone, a stone that one of the wisest people that Bilbo had ever known eyed with caution and fear.

A stone that glowed in a strange and unearthly way, as if lit from within with dragon fire: a stone that Thrain believed was a curse.

Bilbo turned the ring over and over in his pocket, on reflex and not quite deliberately. 

A stone that was often watched by the King, but not always.

He sat at Thorin’s side, in the evening just the day after Thrain’s arrest, and now he glanced cautiously across at the Prince as if he were afraid that his thoughts might betray him, that Thorin would somehow know what it was that he was thinking. But Thorin just glanced back at him, too tired and full of dread to smile, though his eyes did warm a little, some gentleness that had not been there before softening his gaze.

“Are you alright?” he asked, his voice quiet, and Bilbo had to stop himself from leaning in a little closer to the warmth of it, the quiet intimacy between them.

“Are you?” he replied in turn, and Thorin grimaced, glancing down at the papers in his lap that Bilbo was certain he had not read more than a word of.

He felt as if there was more so say, some comfort that he might have been able to offer in turn, and his mouth was already open to attempt to do so when the sound of running feet in heavy boots was heard outside the door: they stared at each other, for a startled second, before Bilbo slipped on the ring, just in time: the door was flung open, the distant echoes of calling voices suddenly audible, and Thorin was already halfway to his feet by the time that Bilbo had composed himself, that split second fear every time he put the ring on that this would be the time that it did not work dissipating.

In the doorway stood Dwalin, far taller and broader than he normally looked in the candlelight, his armour hastily put on and his face drawn into a scowl.

“What is it?” Thorin asked, just as Dwalin barked, “To your feet!”

Thorin did not hesitate: he strode across the room to the stand on which his armour sat, but at Dwalin’s sound of impatience he left the great plate armour and reached instead for a shirt of mail, which he pulled swiftly over his head before belting a sheath to his hip.

“There has been an attack,” Dwalin told him as Thorin busied himself about this task, checking over his shoulders. “There are rebels at the palace gates, I barely heard in time to organise the guards-”

“How did you know?” Thorin asked, everything in place, but Dwalin just shook his head.

“It doesn’t matter. The guards are holding them at the gate, but I need you all in one of the deeper rooms, in case they fall. There are a number of them, with less skill than my people but heavily armed, and damned determined.”

“I should go with you, protect the-”

“No,” Dwalin told him, his voice so suddenly and unexpectedly stern that Bilbo found himself taking a step back, surprised that he had taking such a tone with Thorin.

“Last time I-”

“Last time,” Dwalin replied, his voice raised, startlingly loud in the room. “Your father wasn’t in a cell and you were not heir to the throne! Thror will have my head if you go!”

It seemed that his already casual deference to his Prince extended only when Thorin’s life might not be at risk: right now Dwalin did not seem like his usual, amused self, but as the strong and determined guardsman that he was, and even Thorin was forced to nod in the face of his certainty.

“Good,” Dwalin said, and then he grinned, a sharp and vibrant smile. “Thought you were going to argue with me for a moment there. I need you all in one place, so if they do break through then I know where I need to run to.”

Thorin nodded, his expression grim, and Dwalin clapped him around the shoulder as they drew level with each other.

Dwalin lead them at a quick pace through the winding corridors, a route that Bilbo had not been before despite how often he had padded through these halls. It seemed to take only a few moments before Dwalin paused by what seemed to Bilbo to be a great bare slab of wall, yet he drew his hand across it swiftly, muttering some strange words beneath his breath. At his touch it seemed to shift, slipping back into the rock and then moving to the side, leaving a narrow space that a person might duck through. Bilbo peered after Thorin as the dwarf did just that, a little uncertain whether or not to follow.

Inside was a small room, but before he could make any further observations he heard Vili’s voice, raised and far louder than Bilbo was used to hearing from the usually quiet dwarf.

“my sons-”

Thorin glanced behind him, looking to Dwalin in question, but his friend’s expression was now worryingly blanks.

“They were on guard duty tonight,” he answered. “They refused to leave their posts, and I cannot make them, not when they are sworn guards.”

Thorin’s hand was already reaching to the sword at his hip, but before he could make a move back towards the corridor Dwalin slid the rock shut again, with a huff of exhaustion, leaving Bilbo invisible and in the corridor with him.

He hesitated, for just a moment – Thorin was inside, and he was supposed to protect him, after all – before remembering his promise.

It had been to protect the entire line of Durin, and right now most of them were safe in a hidden room.

But Fili and Kili, the daft and laughing _children,_ were not among them.

Dwalin had already turned, and Bilbo followed him quickly, his footsteps light and silent against the stone floor as they ran towards the gate. The sounds of conflict grew louder as they went further from the secret room and closer to the great doors that closed every evening on the rest of the Kingdom: a dread began to build in Bilbo’s chest as he realised that he had no weapon, the blade that he sometimes carried stashed now in Thorin’s room: he had not thought to pick it up in the haste of their exit, and now he found himself regretting that deeply as the sound of metal crashing against other metal grew louder. They came now the sound of screaming, too, the swell of it feeling to Bilbo almost like a wave that he was not running from, but closer to, and for a moment he wondered if he might drown in that sound, drown in the sudden fear of it, for though he had known fear before, he had never known it like this. He had been afraid when first he had heard the screams of beasts in the night over the Misty Mountains, had been afraid when he had watched his mother grow steadily more and more ill. He had been afraid when people drew too close to him when he was trying to hide, had been afraid when Thorin had reached and grasped for him in the treasury, months ago now. But those had been things that had happened to him, around him: for the first time in his life he found himself running _towards_ battle, a deliberate and conscious choice, and yet when he thought of the faces of those young boys he steeled his resolve, and pushed himself to run even faster.

The guards seemed to be holding the gate well, he saw as they turned the last corner and found themselves in the first hall of the palace: only a few rebels had fought their way past them, and all were engaged fighting the guards. Bilbo felt bile rising in his throat as he caught sight of a body, stretched across the floor in front of him, too unused to sights such as these to be unaffected by them, but he pushed past his nausea, darting around the dwarf, who lay face down against the stone

Did he wear the garb of the guards, or was a miner, a blacksmith, a merchant?

Bilbo did not know, and he could not bring himself to look further in order to find out.

But where were the boys?

“Death to the throne of Durin!” came a voice, loud and sure and so full of a fierce rage that Bilbo turned to it, uncertain for a moment, but the guard that the speaker had been fighting had hair that had once been red, and was now streaked with silver: it was neither Fili nor Kili, those boys that Bilbo had never even exchanged a word with, and yet felt so keenly for. He searched instead for Kili’s mop of unruly dark hair, braids never staying too long in the mess of it, and the mane of blonde that belonged to Fili, but could not see either.

A blade swung: it came so close to Bilbo that he had to throw himself to the ground to avoid it.

His chest smashed painfully against the stone floor, winding him, and for a moment he stared up at the vaulted ceiling, unable to breath, his lungs screaming, his torso contracting.

What had he said, last, to Thorin?

He’d asked him if he was alright, hadn’t he?

Such an inconsequential thing.

He wished, right now, that he had had the chance to say something more profound, something more important. Something about how much Thorin meant to him, something about how much better he had felt since they had begun their strange, improbable friendship.

But he hadn’t, had he?

He had never thought that he might die here.

“Death to Thror!” someone called, close by.

He closed his eyes, the fear a heavy weight against his chest, and then a boot landed against his side, not hard enough to really hurt, but enough to shake him, to rouse him from this sudden fear, and he rolled away, despite the screaming fear in his ears, pulling himself again to his feet: it was then that he saw Kili, bow drawn, face pale but his gaze watchful as he searched for an opening between the fighting dwarf, cautious enough to worry about hitting comrades, rather than enemies. He was tucked between two columns, which is why Bilbo hadn’t seen him initially in his panic, and then he was drawing his arrow back, the fletching brushing against his cheek, and since when had Bilbo focused on such small features of a large scene?

Then the arrow was flying, and there was a look of satisfaction on Kili’s face, a sound of wounded pain from behind them both, and then Kili’s eyes were widening, some nameless fear catching at his mouth so that instead of words all that came from him was a pained sound, a hopeless noise, something animalistic in its cadence, and Bilbo turned.

There, finally, was the second brother,  much closer than Bilbo had realised - but why had he not suspected, when the pair of them were never more than a corridor apart, of course they would fight this way, one in front and one behind, a team even when working separately.

But he wasn’t fighting – he was kneeling, catching his breath, his sword knocked from his hand but a dagger stuck through the eye socket of a fallen foe before him, and there was some strange numbness in his eyes, and Bilbo hadn’t really understood until looking at them both now just how young they both were, still on the border between adulthood and youth – had either of them ever had a cause before today to take a life? And even if they had, had they yet learnt the walls and barriers of older dwarves, who hid the lives that they had taken in the sureness of their gaze, the certainty of their step, the clearness of their expressions?

Kili had stopped making that noise, but time seemed to have slowed: he watched an armoured dwarf advance on Fili, out of the older brother’s line of sight.

He didn’t think to look back, not to where he was sure that Kili was already fumbling for an arrow, fear stripping him of his easy confidence. Instead he darted forward, brushing so close to Fili that the dwarf must have felt the movement of him, for he looked up, his face hardening into something a lot more adult than the fragility of it only a second ago, only to pale again when he too saw the rebel closing in on him.

But Bilbo didn’t see any of that: he was too busy throwing himself bodily around the middle of the dwarf.

In a normal situation, he suspected that a dwarf so solid, so strong, so heavily armoured, would not have fallen at the weight of Bilbo’s too-thin body crashing into him, but his invisibility leant to him the element of surprise, and with a cry he and the dwarf fell both, his jaw clicking painfully off the breastplate, the dwarf’s heavy vambrace connecting firmly with his forehead as he tried his best to roll away, scrambling over the body of another dwarf, the sudden throb of adrenaline not quite enough to drown out the screaming in his head – _that was so stupid, you’ve never done anything as stupid as that in your entire life, what in all of this green earth were you thinking_ – but before the dwarf had a chance to reach for him Fili had grabbed hold of his sword again. Though he gestured for the dwarf to stand again _– stupid boy, some ridiculous code of honour means nothing if you’re dead –_ he dispatched of him quickly, the rebel dwarf perhaps a little too stunned to put up much of a fight. Fili did not have to kill this one, and there was something of a look of relief has he hit him resoundingly around the head with the hilt of his sword, enough for the dwarf to fall unconscious, once again to the floor.

Then Dwalin was there, pulling the both of them into a swift and silent embrace, and as he lay on the floor Bilbo realised that most of the sounds had died out around them – he had simply been too distracted to notice. All that was left, now, was the sound of heavy breathing, the occasional grunt of laboured pain, the sound of weapons being sheathed.

His head fell back against the floor, and for a moment he closed his eyes, before pulling himself to his feet.

 

* * *

 

He did not immediately return to the hidden chamber, nor did he follow the Princes, now firmly under Dwalin’s watchful eye. Instead he slipped into Thorin’s rooms, and did his best to calm his breathing. It did little to ease him, but he sat there for a while none the less, before he left again. Whilst he would normally have taken a seat on the armchair that he now frequently found himself in, it did not feel quite right to sit there tonight, and so instead he tucked himself into an alcove in the stone, sitting on the cool floor with his head resting against the stone, and closed his eyes.

 _Breathe_ , he told himself. _Breathe. You’re fine. Everyone is fine._

It was easier to say than to believe.

They had moved from the hidden room by the time that Bilbo found the rest of the Durin family, by the time that he had recovered enough to deal with being around people (even invisibly) again: he found them eventually, mostly by following the guards, who were all moving to-and-fro with some agitation, waiting impatiently outside of the door until Dwalin arrived, giving him the chance to slip inside without alerting anyone to his presence by opening the door.

The family were sat in what appeared to be Dis’ sitting room – all of them, together, gathered around Fili and Kili, whose scrapes and cuts had been quickly treated.

Thorin was pacing backwards and forwards, glancing around: Bilbo padded quietly over to him, touching his back reassuringly.

Thorin jumped a little, in surprise, and though his face did not change superficially, some line of tension in his shoulders seemed to ease.

He grasped for Bilbo’s arm, squeezing his wrist gently before letting it go again.

“I still don’t understand what happened,” Kili said, startling Bilbo from the strange and sudden comfort that that touch had given him. “The rebel was just marching towards you, and then suddenly he was on the ground, like he had tripped, but it just didn’t _look_ like he did, you know?”

Bilbo couldn’t help but smile a little, at that, despite how he was feeling.

Fili shrugged.

 “It was damn strange, I’ll give you that.”

Vili ruffled his hair.

“You must have a guardian spirit.”

Bilbo glanced up at Thorin’s face: there was warmth there, a surprising fondness, and though he wasn’t looking at Bilbo, he couldn’t help but wonder whether or not it was directed at him.

“As glad as I am about Fili’s guardian spirit,” Frerin interjected, smiling wryly, “I can’t help but wonder why there were rebels attacking the palace to begin with.”

Dwalin made a low, unhappy sound.

“My information suggests it was a result of the King’s declaration to re-take Khazad-dum,” he said, his voice quiet, and almost emotionless. “The people aren’t happy. We should have expected it, but my source didn’t expect that it would bubble over quite so soon – he only just arrived at the palace in time to warn me.”

Frerin sighed, but all Bilbo could think about was this apparent source – was _that_ why he had seen Dwalin meeting Nori in the palace?

He had thought Nori was the centre of the criminal underworld of Erebor – and certainly he had always been the one to shift stolen items, to pass on details when others were seeking less than legal help – and he had known, all along, who Bilbo was and that he was in the mountain. How much of that knowledge had been passed on to Dwalin? How much did the guard know?

How trustworthy was Dwalin, really?

“We shouldn’t be surprised,” Frerin replied, his sightless eyes on the ceiling. “Mahal knows I’m not. Father was right, you know-” he shook his head at the sound that Dis made, one of pain and concern and anger. “He _was,_ even if the King won’t listen. This will be the end of Erebor as we know it. Either we will lost our army, lose our _people,_ or we’ll lose our throne.”

Kili buried his head in his hands.

“The King has already told me that he expects me to sign up.”

All faces turned to him, then, Dis’ face contracting in anger.

“When?”

Kili shrugged, morosely.

“This morning. He told me that I might not be of age to be conscripted, but that he fought for his father when he was my age, and that I should be proud to uphold the name of Durin.”

There was silence at that, no one knowing quite what to say, though Dis moved from her seat to place a comforting hand on Kili’s shoulder, her face contracting in an unspoken grief, in fear.

“I’m scared,” Kili said, so quietly that Bilbo almost missed it. Fili almost threw himself from his seat, kneeling at his brother’s side, wrapping his arm around Kili’s back and pressing his forehead against his arm, his movement so sudden and _desperate_ that Bilbo felt something contract in his throat, something hard and awful that he couldn’t put into words.

“We’ll be there together,” Fili told him, his voice muffled against the fabric of Kili’s tunic. “Anything that happens, we’ll be together – and I’ll protect you.”

Kili nodded, his hand twining in Fili’s hair, holding so tightly that it must have hurt a little: Fili didn’t move to pull away, despite that.

The door opened again, startling them from the subdued moment of grief that had fallen over them, and the Queen swept in, her long silver hair pulled back into a braid, her cheekbones sharp in the low light. She was still wearing one of her usual long dresses, tight around her middle, but it had been swept up, pinned to her waist so that it didn’t drag on the floor, and a rather conspicuous blade hung at her waist, unsheathed.

There was a blood stain on the side of her pale blue dress, and her skin seemed to lack any colour.

“Are you all alright?” she asked softly, her gaze surprisingly tender as she took them all in. It was Dis who nodded a reply, her eyes widening when she took in the stain.

“Are _you_?” she replied, taking a step towards the Queen, who smiled a little. “Where were you? We were worried when the guards didn’t bring you to the hidden room.”

“Aye,” she answered. “I’m fine, it is just a scratch. I was in the library when it happened, and I stayed, to keep an eye on… the librarian. One got through – though from the bodies in the hall I don’t believe that they was the only one. They didn’t cause me too much of a problem.”

There was respect in Dis’ eyes as she nodded, and a compassion that Bilbo didn’t quite understand. The Queen turned to Dwalin, her face contracting into a frown.

“Dwalin, have you heard anything more? Any other threats? Any other violent responses to the King’s news?”

Dwalin seemed oddly unsurprised by the fact that the Queen already seemed to know the reason that all of this had gone on, and merely shrugged.

“Nothing that you haven’t heard, my Queen.”

“Good,” she answered, decisively. “But perhaps it would all be best for us to retire, and at least attempt to sleep. The guards will be as vigilant as ever tonight, perhaps even more so, and I have the utmost faith in their abilities.”

She smiled at Dwalin, and then at Fili and Kili, who actually seemed to blush at the attention, glancing at each other before away, at the ground. But the others seemed to take her words to heart, and with lingering embraces filed out of the room, a guard trailing behind each of them as they went their separate ways.

That guard meant that Bilbo could say nothing to Thorin until they got back to his room: as soon as the door was shut Thorin turned on his heel, staring around the room.

“Bilbo?” he asked, his voice quiet but still somehow frantic. “Are you there?”

He slipped the ring off, and Thorin’s expression seemed to soften at the sight of him, although some worry crept across his expression when he looked harder, at how pale he seemed, at the small bruise that had bloomed on his cheek since last he had seen him – and it was strange, really, because Bilbo couldn’t even remember how he had gotten that one.

“Was that you?” Thorin asked, something stirring in his tone. “Was that you, who knocked the guard over? Kili said that it seemed strange, and I couldn’t help but think-”

Bilbo nodded.

“It was,” he answered, smiling a little. “I didn’t think that Fili was going to get his sword back in time. It was probably a bit stupid, but-”

He was cut off as Thorin strode across the room, pulling Bilbo into a tight embrace, his arms wrapping firmly around Bilbo’s shoulders, holding him so close that Bilbo found his face pressed against Thorin’s chest, warm and comforting.

“You saved him,” Thorin murmured, “you saved my nephew. There isn’t any way that I could ever repay you for that.”

Bilbo shook his head, his nose moving along the curve of Thorin’s chest, and then despite himself he breathed in, the warmth of the smell of him, of Thorin’s skin, and now his throat was tight for a whole other reason than fear or grief, and the beat of his heart, which hadn’t slowed since the skirmish at the gate, seemed only to pick up, his pulse suddenly faster, and he wondered for a moment if it was audible.

Thorin hadn’t moved to pull away, and Bilbo couldn’t bring himself to do so, either.

“Bilbo,” Thorin said, his voice suddenly thick with something unfamiliar, heavy with promise, and Bilbo had meant to reply but all that came out was a low sound.

And before he could even correct himself, before he could say anything more and end this embrace, Thorin’s hand was in his hair, and he was pulling away, just enough to tilt Bilbo’s head up, to bring his own down, and then Thorin’s mouth was on his, hot and demanding, their bodies pressed so close that he could feel every line of Thorin’s chest, every curve of muscle in his arms as he gripped them, and then Thorin was groaning into his mouth and pushing him backwards, slowly, his mouth never leaving Bilbo’s deepening the kiss.

The back of Bilbo’s legs hit the desk with a thump, and Thorin must have felt his wince, because he pulled back, just a little.

“Sorry,” he said, and Bilbo shook his head.

“Don’t be.”

“Have you hurt yourself?”

Bilbo tilted his head to one side.

“A couple of bruises, I think. Nothing serious.”

Thorin took a step back, looking him up and down despite the fact that he couldn’t see any of Bilbo’s minor injuries, and Bilbo had to stop himself from reaching out for him, to draw him back into an embrace. But the moment had passed, turning into something a little softer, a little less tempered, and all Bilbo could do was smile, a small and wry tilt of his mouth as he did reach out, but only to push a loose strand of Thorin’s hair back, tucking it behind his ear.

“Come on,” he said, quietly. “It’s late. And you need your sleep.”

“Aye,” Thorin answered, his shoulders slumping. “But so do you – and the armchair won’t do. Come on.”

He gestured to the bed, and shook his head when he caught sight of Bilbo’s expression.

“Not like that – it’s a big bed, and you need to stretch out, or else you’ll end up in twice as much pain in the morning. Trust me, I’ve ended up with enough bruised ribs in the past.”

The corner of Bilbo’s mouth twisted up, and he excused himself to the washroom as Thorin changed, cautiously removing his shirt, suddenly very aware of how threadbare his clothes were, how musty and strange they smelt from so many times of being hand-washed and worn damp, how much his bones jutted from his body after so many years of too little food. But he pushed it from his mind as he washed his face, padded quietly back out of the room.

The light in the room had been distinguished by the time that he returned, the only light coming from the low embers in the fire, a comfortable glow. Bilbo paused for a moment as he caught sight of Thorin, his hair loose down his back now, clothes discarded but for a loose pair of pants, hanging low on his hips, though Bilbo did not have long to appreciate the view, as he was already slipping underneath the covers. It felt a little awkward as Bilbo padded around to the other side of the bed, and joined him, lying flat on his back and staring up at the roof, shifting uncomfortably.

Everything was quiet between them, for a long, slow moment.

“Will Fili and Kili really have to go to war?” he asked the quiet dark of the room, feeling rather than seeing Thorin shift beside him, rolling on his side to face Bilbo.

“Aye,” Thorin replied, some unspoken sadness in his voice. “We all will – me, Dis, Vili, the boys too. Dis will remain in the mountain – Frerin will remain behind as the second heir, in case anything should happen to us.”

Bilbo swallowed.

“Is that likely?”

Thorin sighed.

“Perhaps. Probably. My father – and Frerin, they are both right. It is a fool’s errand.”

And then Bilbo was rolling on his side too, to face Thorin, his face all planes of shadows in this light, pressed into the pillows, but he wasn’t frowning as he looked at Bilbo – he did not look like a person about to be sent to war. No, his expression was one that Bilbo could not immediately place – there was awe in there, and hope, and something strong and fearless and sincere, something that was almost tender.

“Aren’t you afraid?”

Thorin nodded, slowly.

“I’m terrified.”

They lay that way for some time, until the fire had burnt to almost nothing and Thorin’s eyes had flickered shut, his face relaxing, the slow rise of his chest moving in the gentle rhythm of this sleep. Like this he could have been decades younger, his face smooth and without care, his mouth almost smiling, a soft expression. It made something that had been wavering, uncertain, inside him solidify, a decision made as he lay there that he knew that he would not be able to undo.

He stroked the curve of Thorin’s jaw, just for a moment, before lying down and slipping his ring on, in case anyone happened to come in during what was left of the night.

For the first time in as long as he could remember, sleep found him quickly, and no dreams found him that night.

 

* * *

 

Bilbo crept from the bed in the early house of the morning, wincing a little as he stretched out his aching body, wondering just how many more bruises he amassed yesterday – he retrieved his jacket from the washroom without checking, moving quickly, before he lost his resolve or accidentally woken Thorin up.

It was easy enough to slip out of the door and down the now-familiar corridors, dodging around the guards that were still on duty.

 He made it to the throne room soon enough, finding it unguarded in the early hours – no doubt the dwarves who would usually be standing in ceremony there had been called elsewhere after the ruckus the night before. He didn’t expect to see anyone else in there, when he slipped through the door, but to his surprise he saw he was not alone.

“Hello Bilbo,” Frerin said, quietly.

He was stood before the throne, his eyes fixed on the Arkenstone, a frown furrowing between his brows, and he did not turn when Bilbo drew level with him.

“You should let me do it,” Bilbo told him, and that did make Frerin look at him, his frown only deepening.

“Why?”

Bilbo shrugged.

“They won’t find me.”

“But it will never stay hidden – it needs to go, and only I can do that.”

Bilbo took a deep breath.

“I suppose that you know a lot of passages in this city, don’t you? Ones that no one else does – I suspect that you were a curious child.”

Frerin nodded, slowly.

“Then if I were to say to you that I would leave something in the mouth of the dragon, would you understand what I meant?”

“Aye,” Frerin said, the word catching in his throat. “I would.”

“Good,” Bilbo replied. “Now, you should leave. I suspect that it won’t take long for them to notice what has happened, and people need to see you. Go wake your sister up, and the boys, and Thorin too – take them all down to the city. I’ll wait a while, and give you time – you need to make sure that you all have an alibi.”

Frerin stared back at the stone.

“Are you sure?”

Bilbo didn’t need to answer: he rested his hand on Frerin’s wrist, pushing his backwards, away from the throne.

“Go,” he told him, and slowly Frerin nodded.

“Thank you,” he told Bilbo, before he left the room, slipping quietly through the door.

Bilbo waited a while, as he had promised, watching the stone, the strange play of light within it, wondering how such a small thing could change the lives of so many, just by _being_ there. He counted the time down in his head, making sure to go slowly, and not to rush – twice a guard looked inside, checking, but he did not move, knowing well that they would never know that he was there.

And then, eventually, he climbed on to the throne, clambering up onto the armrest in order to reach. It was a stretch, but eventually he did it.

The Arkenstone fell from the stonework with surprising ease, as if it had always been waiting to be taken.

And with that, Bilbo Baggins, the thief of Erebor, left the throne room, its most valuable possession tucked innocuously into his front pocket.


	11. Chapter Ten

The mountains have always watched us.

Thorin could remember his father telling him that, from when he was too young to really understand what it even meant. The words had echoed for so long in his memory that they had been engraved there, in some place within himself that was deep and fundamental and impossible to explain to anyone else, one of those memories that was as much a part of him as the shade of his eyes, or the beads that he had worn behind his ears since he was a child.

He could still hear the sound of his father’s voice, if he tried hard enough, deep and soft and full of a gentle love, quiet and undiminishing, that he had never truly appreciated until his mother had passed away, with all of her excessive gestures and exuberant declarations of affection. Thrain had always told him that odd piece of wisdom with a strange and distant look in his eye, as if he were seeing something far away that Thorin was too young to see himself – he’d always thought that when he grew up he would understand, but the older he grew the more he came to realise that there were some mysteries of his father’s that would forever be out of his reach, that no matter how wise he became, there would always be things that he would not understand.

They stuck with him though, those words, and sometimes when he was alone, walking the gabled corridors of his mountain home, he would reach out and touch the stone, the lonely, low light enough to convince him, for a fleeting moment, that he might hear something, some echoing song, the kind that Frerin had always been able to hear.

He never had: few were born with that purest of stone-knowledge, that inherent ability to hear its whispers, as if molten rock fed their veins, not blood. So few, now, were able to listen to the mountains, to understand the mountains, the way that they once had.

But the mountains have always watched us.

They are the oldest of giants, the true pinnacles of the aging earth, growing or shrinking over time, but always there. The smallest hill might one day become the greatest peak, or else a mountain top that once kissed the sky might end up nothing more than a low moorland, worn down over the long ages of the earth, by footsteps of a thousand men that were now nothing more than dust. But they were still there, none the less, their bones heavy with all that they have known, ever watching the movements of those quicker, sillier creatures that inhabit the wide lands of the earth. Sometimes their anger turned their jutting pinnacles into giants, living things made of stone that fought as thunderstorms echoed through the vast chasms of the mountains: sometimes their slopes saw enough blood that they began to grow their own creatures, creatures of earth and darkness, ones who would never see the light of day, deep underground, where no one would ever see.

Thorin knew that that much was true: Frerin had told him enough times when they were children, full of youthful curiosity and certainty, of the stories that the stone had told him, whispered into his skin late at night. Thorin had heard too the stories of those strange creatures that had lived in the depths of Khazad-dum, skin the colour of the stone, long grown over the places that their eyes should have been, timid and peaceful things, slow and quiet. The dwarves there had dug deep enough to find them, at one point, and had found them gentle, and afraid.

They had sealed those mines back up, in the places that they had broken into to the soul-stone, the rock that had birthed the stone-ones. The dwarves of the old Kingdom had known enough not to disturb them.

Many things had been lost, at the fall of Khazad-dum, but not those stories.

No, the mountains certainly did watch them, ageless and without judgement, for the most part. Thorin knew enough to know that, had enough faith left in him to believe. They watched it all: the rise of the stars, and the birth of the moon, and the arrival of the races of this earth. They spoke to the clouds, fickle and fluttering things, always changing and dying and being born again into different shapes; they spoke to the wind too, all the winds, and their odd stories, brought from all across the land, from all those places that the mountains would never see, for they were fixed into place, caretakers of the land that they dominated, in their own way.

And sometimes people came to the mountains, didn’t they? More and more, as time went by. They found the caves and tunnels, the veins of the rock, and followed them down to its heart, to that most sacred and secret part of every mountain. Some of them were content enough with that, but most were not: space was always needed, expansion always desired, and soon the mountains were forced to bear its new visitors carving out its flesh, opening it slowly up, finding all the beauty that it had to offer. But the mountains had always carried this with a certain patience, knowing soon enough that all would pass.

Dwarves had come to Erebor, once. That was a story that every Ereborean knew, from the poorest to the wealthiest. They had found a cave, and they had dug, and it had taken far longer than they had expected to break into any sort of open space within it. Perhaps for a while they had questioned whether to continue, whether to leave and find a mountain that required less work, but in the end they had persevered, digging for months without seeing the sunlight, without tasting the rain, only the strange warmth of the stone, the dim glow of the deep lichen kept in jars to illuminate their work.

And eventually they had found it, found those immense and beautiful caverns that now formed the greatest of halls in their Kingdom, lit with crystals, filled with the vast silence that the deep miners called the Great Peace. They had sent word to their kin, to their friends, to their children, to join them, to carve out a place for themselves, here in the lonely rock.

That had been the founding of Erebor, and Erebor had been good to them.

But the mountains have always watched.

And then the Arkenstone had come to them, a gift from the soul-stone according to Thror, only Thrain had never been certain that it was really a gift – a warning, a test perhaps, but more than just a gift.

For the materials of the mountain could be forged by the hand of the dwarves into something else, gold to jewellery or iron to blade, so too could they be shaped by other things.

Or at least, that was what Thorin thought his father believed.

And after all, dwarves were not the only ones who heard the Great Peace in the stone, who listened to the calls of the mountain song – and those others were as strong as they were greedy, and craved that peace as much as gold. What the dragons truly were was lost to time, but they came from the stone as much as the dwarves had, only forged by a different hand, on heath or in the iron shadow, and they too heard the stories that the mountains sang, and longed as much as the dwarves did to possess it for their own. They had been created for war, created in malice, and perhaps the Great Peace afforded those great and terrible minds some calm, as they lay on their stolen hoardes.

Why had Smaug come to Erebor, all those years ago? Was it just had it had heard the siren call of Thror’s amassed gold, or had he been searching for some place to rest, a mountain carved deep enough that he could feel the Great Peace, the echoing stillness, the tranquillity that only the mountains could afford them? All those hours that Thrain had spent pouring over the old tomes on dragon-lore hadn’t made sense to Thorin in the past: so many times he had come across him, turning drawings of the Arkenstone over and over in his hands, muttering under his breath,

_“but what did he leave behind?”_

In his rooms, deep in Erebor, these words and warnings of Thrain echoed around Thorin’s mind as he slept, his dreams full of a song that he had no words to describe, a promise that he never quite understood, the cool shine of the most precious of jewels behind his eyes.

 

* * *

 

The tunnel was as dark as it was long, but Bilbo knew where he was going, and so padded quietly through the dark, one hand pressed against the rough rock of the wall more for comfort than for balance.

His heart felt as if it might burst free from his chest: right now, he wasn’t certain if he wasn’t dying, but he forced one foot in front of the other, made himself continue, the heavy weight he was carrying as literal as it was metaphorical.

Frerin could hear the mountain – Bilbo couldn’t help but wonder what it might be saying, right now.

He had stumbled on this tunnel by accident not long after he had first arrived in Erebor, when he had still been exploring, still been trying to work out where everything was and where he might hide himself should anyone ever discover him: for a while he had slept in here, before he had found those deep dungeons that he had made his home. Its opening was nothing more than a crack in the wall, so narrow that you might have been forgiven for thinking that it was just a fissure in the rock. But squeeze through (and it was tight enough for Bilbo, no doubt Frerin would struggle a little, unless he knew some other way into the passage, another opening that Bilbo had missed in the darkness) and you would find yourself in a passageway that was a little more comfortable to walk down, though it was still one of the smallest that Bilbo had found in Erebor, the rock cut rough and the ceiling low.

He had often wondered, when he had first found it, who had made it, and how long ago that had been?

And why, why had they made it?

He doubted that he would ever know the reason, that he would ever be able to throw aside the shroud of mystery, just one of many within the mountain. So many years of history, a fog through which he could never hope to perceive.

The first time he had come along here he had been certain that the passageway would never end, that the darkness would stretch on: a rare moment of claustrophobia had seized him, a prickle of discomfort on the back of his neck that threatened to grow into something much more dangerous – he could feel it again now, something heady and worryingly real.

But he swallowed it down, as best he could, ignored the thump of his increasing heart rate, knowing that soon enough he would reach the end.

The silence around him seemed thin, somehow, and strange, broken only by the sound of his padding feet.

And then, in the distance, a sliver of light.

A beacon in the dark, and he felt himself draw in a deep breath as he saw it, his hand flitting once more to his pocket, swallowing hard. It grew brighter as he drew closer, until its source became clear – another fissure in the rock, this one far too small for him to hope to crawl through, but still he pressed his face close to that light, closing his eyes against the sudden brightness that almost hurt in its intensity after so long in the dark.

What was he doing? What was he doing here, now, with this ring on his finger and this weight in his pocket, a thief once again? He had had, for a moment, a glimmer of legitimacy, a position at the side of Prince, protecting the royal line even if they hadn’t known. And he had time, didn’t he? He could slip back, replace the stone: he could hear the quiet bustle of the slowly waking city beneath him, and it was obvious that no one had noticed anything wrong yet – everything sounded too peaceful, too normal. If he went quickly, silently, out of sight, he could reach the throne room in time to replace it - the Arkenstone, prised from its seat in Thror’s thone, sitting now uncomfortably in Bilbo’s pocket.

He’d done it. He’d stolen it. He’d taken the greatest jewel of the strongest Dwarven Kingdom, from underneath their noses, the greatest feat of any thief that he had ever heard of. His forays into the treasury seemed inconsequential in comparison, and so long ago, too.

But he couldn’t return it. There was no going back.

There was an ache growing in his temples, and a worse one lingering around his clenched jaw, something that threatened to turn into an overwhelming despair if he wasn’t careful.

This was not the person that he had wanted to be.

Would Thorin ever forgive him? Would he ever trust Bilbo again?

Somehow, he doubted it.

Slowly, he opened his eyes, his face pulling into something of a grimace at the light, blinking a little outwards at the great teeth looming around him, the long and protracting jaw bones, the bleached white bone of a skull. Why the tunnel let out in the cavernous stretch of a dragon’s skeletal mouth was just another question that he would have no answer for, but as his eyes adjusted he looked down through those great teeth, through the mouth of Smaug, who glared still down in all his mortal glory at any who dared to enter Erebor, and he wondered none the less.

Once his pulse had returned to something normal, he set back down the long, dark tunnel once more, his pockets somewhat lighter, the Arkenstone wrapped in rags, hidden in the great jaw of a long-dead beast that had once tried to take this mountain for his own.

 

* * *

 

 

He didn’t return to Thorin’s rooms right away: when he reached the end of the tunnel, back into the main passages of the city, he hesitated for a moment, his feet trying to lead him back to the rooms that he was starting to think of as ‘theirs’ (a dangerous game, he knew, a game that he would eventually come to regret). But instead he had turned the other way, his head a mess of thoughts and confusion, sticking to the edges of the corridors as they became busier.

Eventually he found himself outside of a familiar door, and after only a moment of hesitation he let himself in, slipping past the empty and bare rooms and up the narrow stairs to the room where Nori did his business, a room without a door, the dusty floor tracked with footprints.

Nori was sat at the windowsill, watching the ground below, and he didn’t turn when Bilbo stepped into the room, just made a low noise in the back of his throat.

“I’ve been wondering how long it would take until you showed up again,” he said, quietly, and Bilbo slipped the ring from his finger, not bothering to ask how his fellow thief had known that he was there.

“What’s happening, Nori?” he asked, and to his displeasure his voice sounded much more distressed than he had intended. “What’s going to happen to the King?”

Nori shrugged, a languorous movement.

“Can’t tell the future, Bilbo.”

Bilbo scowled, his arms folding across his chest.

“Don’t be facetious.”

Nori sighed then, and turned to Bilbo, and to his surprise he realised that the dwarf looked tired, exhausted in fact, far more so than Bilbo had ever seen him before. He shifted on the windowsill, and there was that rarely seen flash of gold – the signet ring that Bilbo had caught sight of only on rare occasions before now.

“You should know far better than me what is going on at the palace, Bilbo,” Nori commented, spreading his arms and moving his shoulder in something close to a shrug. “You’re the one living there, after all.”

“And yet I keep coming across you there, don’t I?” Bilbo snapped back, his temper beginning to run short. “Strange.”

Nori turned away again, his face carefully blank, his expression giving nothing away, but Bilbo’s patience had worn thin, and he had too many questions that still needed answering to let it go.

“Who are you, Nori?” he found himself asking. “And why are you having meetings in secret with Dwalin? And I don’t want a flippant response, I don’t want another _cover up,_ alright? I’ve had enough.”

Nori’s eyes didn’t turn back to him, staying focused on the road beneath them, and for a moment Bilbo almost felt bad: after all, Nori didn’t owe him an answer, didn’t owe him anything, in fact – all he had done since he and Bilbo had met was keep an eye out for him, passing on decent jobs and warning him away from ones that might have proved dangerous. But he did not retract his waspish questions, did not apologise for his bitter tone, and after a moment Nori pulled the ring from underneath the layers of his clothes, the long chain catching in his hair for a moment as he pulled it off, and threw it across the room. Bilbo caught it awkwardly, fumbling a little, and when he glanced back at Nori he found that the dwarf was staring at him intently, some message that Bilbo could not quite decipher in his gaze.

The crest was… familiar. It was impossible not to know it, after how long he had been in Erebor. The question was how Nori had come to be in this place, doing what he did, if this was his heritage, his family. He handed it back to Nori slowly, understanding now that it was better not to say anything out loud.

Nori had pressed on him often enough, after all, that mountains had ears.

“I am no one, son of no one,” Nori said, and his voice was bitter.

It was Bilbo’s turn to look away as Nori slid the chain back around his throat, feeling in some way as if this quick and fleeting motion was somehow private. He was still watching the shadows play across the wall from the low candlelight when Nori began to speak again.

“Erebor is angry, you know that as well as I do. The people that matter, the ones that watch and guard the throne, they noticed the way it was going decades ago, have done their best to keep the peace for as long as possible. That’s where I came into it.”

He swallows, and for one, almost impossible moment, Bilbo could have sworn that a vulnerability stole across Nori’s face for a moment, a fleeting hint of fear, something young and angry and afraid. It was gone almost as soon as it appeared, but Bilbo couldn’t forget it.

“I ended up-” he cut himself off, whatever he had been going to say about his circumstances lost as he cleared his throat. “I was offered a job, anyway. Become the ear on the streets for the Line of Durin, and at the same time… well, I took it, anyway. Old Fundin was apologetic as anything when he came to me with it, but I’ve been doing it ever since. Not really sure I’ll ever be able to stop. S’why I told you not to go back to the palace, you know – didn’t want you to end up in the same situation.”

Bilbo shrugged, an uncomfortable roll of his shoulders, not knowing how to answer – because in truth, he had ended up stuck. For different reasons perhaps, but still. He was just as unable to leave the situation behind as Nori was.

“Erebor needs a real King, Bilbo. Not some madman leading us all to war, forcing a-” he cut himself off, and with some disdain, turned back to the window.

“The people were unhappy: now they are angry, and that is even worse. They won’t just stand by and let their children be led to war – you saw that yourself last night, by all accounts.” There was a flash of humour in his eyes then as he turned to shoot a smirk in Bilbo’s direction that was only slightly lacking in its usual bite. “That guard of Thorin’s isn’t as stupid as he looks, you know. He saw that stunt you played with the little Princes – and yes, I’ve already heard about it.”

Bilbo glanced down at his feet, worn and scarred and coloured by the dust that coated the floorboards.

“But it is only going to get worse, you know. Unless someone brings Thror in line, unless something changes, the attacks are only going to keep coming. And you can’t be everywhere, no matter how hard you try or how many tunnels you sneak through.”

Bilbo swallowed, something in his throat a hard and uncomfortable lump.

“Be careful, little thief,” Nori told him, his eyes still on the street below, just a touch of warmth in his voice, almost impossible to miss if you weren’t looking for it. Bilbo found himself wondering, just for a moment, if Nori ever switched off, and if he would ever be able to be something other than what fate had forced him to become. But, like so many other things, to this he had no answer.

“Go,” Nori told him, and his voice was strange, distant.

Bilbo nodded, and slipped quietly away.

 

* * *

 

 

Whilst his visit to Nori had only really raised as many questions as it had answered (particularly when it came to Nori himself, the enigmatic thing that he was), Bilbo did find his resolve somewhat strengthened. The doubts he had entertained, the fear and what the outcome of his theft would be, all of that was still present, still a hard and painful truth lingering on the edge of his mind, but he knew that he had done…

Well, perhaps not the right thing, but certainly what needed to be done.

So it was with a certain amount of resolve that he slipped back into Thorin’s rooms. He had left them in the early hours of the morning, and he was startled to realise, when he glanced at the water clock on Thorin’s desk, that only a couple of hours had gone by. It had felt like days.

He wandered, aimlessly, across the room, finding himself at the doorway of the empty bedchamber, the sheets unmade and the room still warm from sleep. It was without quite meaning to that he came slowly closer, his fingertips just touching the fabric of the bedding, the warmth of them.

He sank to his knees beside the bed, resting his forehead against the mattress.

The rooms felt oddly empty without Thorin in them – clearly Frerin had taken Bilbo’s instructions to heart, and he had to hope that they were all down in the city, somewhere that many people could see them – and he found himself aching suddenly with a desire to see him, to see those tired eyes and broad shoulders, the long strands of his dark braids falling down the thick line of his neck, to see those expressive hands and the way that he smiled, just a little, when he caught sight of Bilbo. To touch the line of his jaw, to stroke the frown lines away from his forehead, to-

But he shook his head, knowing the danger of such thoughts. What he felt for Thorin – well. They were the sort of thing that he didn’t dare dwell on, knowing only too well the impossibility of them, particularly after what had happened this morning.

The sheets still smelt of Thorin, and his face creased into an expression of desolation as he buried his face against them, for just a moment.

Because Thorin – well. Thorin was everything, really. The first person in so long to stand by Bilbo’s side, to _trust_ him, to let him in. And he had put so much faith in Bilbo, in some half-starving thief, an outsider who had broken into Erebor and had stolen from it too – but that hadn’t seemed to matter to Thorin, not really. He’d looked past the invisibility and the strangeness and the fact that Bilbo had kept so much back from him, and had taken him in all the same. There was gratitude in the mess of Bilbo’s emotions, threading through it all, but there was something so much more in there too, something bittersweet and tinged with longing, something that he had a name for, a name that he was too afraid to use, for fear of what it would mean if he admitted it to himself. And he had done this for Thorin, had done it for them all, but he knew with no uncertainty that what he had done would come out, in the end, and would ruin all that they had built between them.  

He had done what was necessary: he knew that, and he knew too that he was not the only one who agreed.

It didn’t make the guilt any less, nor too the regret.

Footsteps in the hallway, the loud clomp of boots, made him raise his head, breaking the train of his thoughts before he could linger in them too long, and he found himself touching the ring on his finger for a fleeting moment, as if to make sure that it was still there, as an echoing knock rang from the door. He padded back to the living room as the knocks came again, after only a short pause, watching as the door creaked ever so slightly open and an unfamiliar voice called for the Prince.

“He’s not here,” came a voice from outside, and a grunt of acknowledgement from someone else. “Look elsewhere – I don’t want to be the one to upset the King this morning.”

Bilbo swallowed, nervously.

There was only one thing that this could mean.

 

* * *

 

 

He reached the throne room soon after – he had waited a while for the guards to leave, before slipping as quietly as he could through corridors that were far busier than they normally would have been. Thror’s voice had been echoing through the corridors as he approached, loud enough that he had heard it long before he had reached the great hall in which a now desecrated throne sat. Thror was striding back and forwards in front of it, his grave face alive with fury, his hair a mess, un-braided and wild, as if he had been running his hands through it for some time.

He tuned out the raving – for that was what it was, nonsensical and half-mad with something between grief and a pure, unadulterated rage – knowing full well that his guilt would only rise its head again if he listened. The room was full already, the dwarves around him cowering back from their King’s ire, faces familiar an new. The council, looking small and afraid: dignitaries, staring around themselves in bewilderment. The Queen stood, her skin even paler than usual, her eyes searching the room for something that Bilbo couldn’t place; Dwalin too, and Balin, their parents exchanging quick and worried glances at the side of the dais; even the librarian was here, wringing his hands beneath his long woollen sleeves, his eyes darting to and fro as if he did not know what he had done to end up here.

“You!” he yelled, startling Bilbo from his daze, and for a moment he was certain that Thror could see him, that the King knew all of what he had done, but then he realised that Thror was not pointing at him, but behind him, at the door. He span, blinking, stumbling slightly in his haste and having to steady himself before he bumped into a dwarf close by.

There, in the doorway behind him, stood the children of Thrain: Thorin took an uncertain step forward in front of his brother and sister, his hands balling into fists against his side, and Bilbo couldn’t help but wonder, in a strange and distant way, if Thorin knew that he was doing it. Behind him Frerin’s expression was stoic, his golden eyes turned unseeing to the ceiling, and even from here Bilbo could see the line of movement as Dis swallowed, one hand disappearing up the long sleeves of her dress. Her other hand came up, stopping her sons and husband, who were trailing in her wake, and with a slight step to the side she moved in front of them, as if shielding them from her grandfather’s anger.

“Children of a wretched father!” Thror’s voice echoed across the room, accusingly. “What have you done with it?!”

But already Raala was sweeping forward, her hair un-braided down her back, Fundin reaching for her arm too late to stop her. She bowed low in front of him, but when she raised her head again there was a strength in her shoulders that Bilbo could see even from this side of the room, when he finally tore his face away from the pained confusion on Thorin’s face, so open and unguarded in this moment that the ache in Bilbo’s chest renewed itself with vigour.

“My King,” she said, her voice moderate, calm, reasonable. “The sons and daughter of Thrain – and her sons and husband – have been down at the market for hours. We have loyal dwarves who attest to their presence since before the last guard rotation, when we know that the Arkenstone was still in place on your throne.”

Despite himself, Bilbo found himself looking back at Thorin once more, even though it hurt to see the confusion that fell across his features, the concern, the growing fear. Dis too looked shocked by the news, stepping even closer to her sons, her hand finding Fili’s shoulder behind her and squeezing it, tight.

Frerin looked… well, Frerin looked as he always did, calm and sure, glancing perceptively around the room, a small frown between his eyebrows the only external indicator that anything was wrong.

“Grandfather-” Thorin began, but Thror’s eyes were fixed on Raala.

“Are you sure?” he barked, and Raala nodded.

“Your grandchildren are loyal to you, always, my King.”

Thror nodded, but his eyes did not turn back to his kin, just began their darting pattern across the room again, growling under his breath. The throne seemed to stare at Bilbo, the gaping hole that had once held the Arkenstone, accusing and empty in the dimly lit hall.

An unexpected touch shook him from his guilt: Frerin’s fingers ghosted against his wrist for a moment as they passed, the group of them moving closer to the throne, Thorin still leading, the dwarves parting around them. Bilbo took advantage of that to follow them, so close behind Fili that the young prince might have felt the ghost of his breath against his back had he not been distracted, had the room not been so tightly packed with people anyway.

Thorin stopped, close to the dais but not beside it, as if unsure of his place.

Thror was breathing heavily, and he paused for a moment, shaking his head, but then his eyes were caught by the scar of a ripped away jewel on his throne, and his scowl deepened.

“Bring me my son,” he said, and now his voice was quieter, harder. “Bring me the creature that would steal from his own father.”

Raala raised her head again, but Thror spat a response before she could say anything.

“Now!”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> do remember that you can find me on [tumblr](http://northerntrash.tumblr.com/)!
> 
> now, a question: or a long time, the plan for this fic has been to have it in two parts, with a one shot in the middle to explain the time difference that there is going to be between the two. now - would people prefer this , or would they prefer the fic to just go on in one whole piece? Any thoughts would be really appreciated (:


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A few notes! Firstly, an extra long chapter, because I love you guys. Secondly, there seems to be some confusion about Raala and Ulla, which I’m sure is my fault - I'll go back and check through the fic to fix any mistakes that I have made. But to clarify, Raala is the mother of Dwalin and Balin and the wife of Fundin, and Ulla is the Queen. :)
> 
> Thirdly! Thank you all so much for getting back to me about the question of whether to divide the fic or not, and I've spent a lot of time thinking about it. It was pretty evenly split, but I'm going to go with keeping the fic as one continuous story on here, with having the stories that I was going to put in between them as chapters in a side series. So the collective fic will end up as two ao3 entries (and it won't be necessary to read the sides to keep up with the main story) – does that work for everyone?
> 
> Finally, apologies if this chapter feels a bit rough. I've been in hospital this week, and don't quite have the energy to do any further proofing/editing. <3

Frerin’s hand was tight on his wrist, their touch hidden by the long fall of his sleeves and the angle that they stood, Bilbo between Frerin and the wall of the great throne room up near the dais, which they had moved to the side of.

It mattered little, anyway: there were many hands clenched in fists in the room – tight ones of anger and loose, incredulous ones, as if their owners had yet to figure out exactly what was happening. Raala was back beside her son and husband, both of whom hand hands on her arms as if to steady her: Balin and Fundin were exchanging wary glances across her, as if in some silent communication.

The Queen stood quietly, her hands clasped before her. There were rubies at her throat, and a stillness about her features that spoke more of hurried currents hidden underneath than a calm surface.

Bilbo could not see Thorin, not from this angle: his back was to him, his shoulders broader than ever in their tension. Bilbo could imagine his expression, or rather, could imagine a myriad of expressions: fury, grief, confusion. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to know which emotion was currently wining the war for Thorin’s heart.

It seemed like only moments passed before Thrain was brought before them all, but he knew it must have been far longer than that, for no one could walk the distance from the deep cells to the throne room at such a speed – and he would know, having spent so long traversing the corridors of the mountain. Thrain was thinner than last time Bilbo had seen him, and far less grand: the lines on his face seemed all the more pronounced now, the shadows under his eyes far darker. There was some slowness about his movements that spoke of great fear, and great exhaustion: dressed only in a thin tunic, his hair unbraided down his back and his beard ungroomed, he looked far older than he should have done, as if he and Thror were equals in age, rather than father and son.

Thror let out a low and guttural sound at the sight of him, full of rage and fire.

“You!” he said, and the croaking whisper of the King’s voice was somehow far worse than any bellow would have been. “What have you done with it?”

Thrain raised his head, and Bilbo felt a wave of nausea well up inside him.

“Done with what?” he replied, and despite his appearance his voice was as strong as ever, tempered and even, filling the great hall with little effort.

It was clear enough to him that Thrain had no idea what had happened (and how could he?), but Bilbo was uncertain whether or not that was simply his own guilt talking. Dwarves shuffled around him; the crowd let out some strange collective sound, too complex for Bilbo to really understand.

“Thief!” Thror replied, and this time it was a yell, though it seemed reedy, frail. “You took it! You took the heart of this mountain, you stole it from _me-_ ”

“Father-“

“Don’t!” Thror barked. “You have neither the right nor the privilege to call me by that name! What son steals from his father? You would usurp me from this very throne if you could!”

“I…” Thrain trailed off, his eyes caught by the glaring scar in the throne behind the King, the seemingly vast space where once the Arkenstone had rested.

Thror following the line of his sight.

“Wipe that surprise off your face,” he spat. “And do not insult me with your pretence. You had it stolen – you and that gang of so called _revolutionaries_. You would do anything for this throne, for this kingdom! _But I will not let you take it from me!_ ”

The chains binding him clinked as Thrain pulled himself to his full height.

“You dishonour me!” he called, his voice loud but still controlled. “I seek nothing but peace, between us and for Erebor! All I have ever done is to protect the throne and the people of the Mountain!”

“You do not deny it!” Thror replied, and his voice was almost a wail, his face contorted with rage and grief and a confusion that was devastating to witness, as if he were caught between two warring voices in his own mind. The hair on the back of Bilbo’s neck prickled at the sight of it, wondering how much was left of the real Thror inside the dwarf before him, how much was left fighting and alone and trapped in a madness that he could not escape.

“I do deny it!” Thrain yelled, and just for a moment his composure, his calm tone, seemed to break. “I did not steal that cursed stone from you, though I am glad that someone has! It has sent you mad, don’t you understand? You are not yourself!”

But Thror seemed unwilling to listen. He raised one shaking arm in the air, pointing a finger heavy with rings at the dwarf that he had once called his son.

“Death!” Thror spat, his voice high, almost shrieking. “Death!”

“You cannot sentence me without trial!” Thrain yelled back. “Not unless you plan to undermine the laws that our kin have held sacred for generations!”

The crowd murmured: no matter on whose side they were on, they seemed to be in agreement. Not even the King could renounced the word of the law. Thror seemed to hesitate for a moment, almost lost, before he scowled.

“Very well,” he conceded. “A trial it shall be. But let us see if any of the Kingdom are stupid enough to stand up for a thief and a liar.”

But Thrain was shaking his head, his eyes on the stone of the floor, his face furrowed as if in deep pain. When he looked up he seemed to stand straighter, his shoulders straight and thrown back, his face on the King but his voice carrying to all of them. He looked more like Thror than he ever had in this moment, Bilbo thought, or at least like the Thror that occasionally came out from beneath the madness: he looked like Thorin too, in the set of his jaw and the brightness in his eyes, as if lit by life and grief and all the tossing waters of the ocean. He looked as if he carried the weight of the world, yet only became stronger for it: his ragged clothes, the chains around his wrists and ankles, they were nothing. No bondage could ever truly subdue him, Bilbo realised now: not the greatness of him, not his strength and bravery.

“No,” Thrain said, and he did not have to yell: all in the hall were craning to hear his words, some gravity about his stance ensuring that every dwarf (and hobbit) could focus on nothing but the disgraced Prince.

“I will not have your mockery of a trial,” he said, and though all heard he seemed to speak only to his father. “I declare here,” and finally his eyes left his father, to look around the room, as if he were calling each and every person there to witness. “I declare you ' _iglâd_. You are ill: you are not the dwarf that you once were. You are not worthy of the throne you sit on, or of the people you lead.”

The room was echoingly silent: Bilbo was certain that something of great importance had happened, something that he did not understand. Not one person seemed to move: he glanced around him, and every dwarf that he could see seemed to be made of stone.

Thror lunged forward suddenly, frozen only for a moment in his shock, but the line of guards surrounding Thrain were enough to stop him, their faces uncertain. Only Dwalin dared put his hand on the King and push him, gently but firmly, back to the dais. Raala’s expression was raw, and open, as the King turned murderous eyes on the guard, though he said nothing, turning instead back to his son.

“Fine,” Thror spat. “You lie, and you steal, and then you dare to make such accusations. No trial for Thrain, no quick and easy death. We shall fight under the blood laws, and see if your weak and treacherous mind can save you from steel.”

The silence was broken: there was a choked sound from somewhere nearby, and that seemed to be enough. The room descended into chaos: from his position, Bilbo saw at several dwarfs slip away from the crowd, as if desperate to escape the crowded hall before something happened. The tension was palpable: he felt as if he could taste the fear, some shared terror. People were muttering, murmuring, their voices indecipherable but for the emotion behind them. The sound was a sudden wave in the silence: on the dais Thror was barking orders to dwarves, who were scurrying away. In the centre of it all stood Thrain: the guards had moved away from him now, as if they too were afraid, and in this moment he looked quite alone.

Frerin’s hand tightened around his wrist.

“What is it?” Bilbo dared to whisper.

Frerin bit his lip, his face pale.

“The blood laws- they’re complicated. But the King has challenged my f… Thrain to a fight. It is the final word in any dispute under stone: whoever survives takes the victory.”

“Survives?” Bilbo whispered, his voice breaking, and Frerin nodded.

“It is a fight to the death. But worse still, perhaps: patricide is one of our greatest crimes, Bilbo. Should Thrain win, he is to be banished from the Mountain, perhaps for the rest of his life.”

“The King?” Bilbo replied, wondering for a moment, eyes on the dwarves that were now returning to the dais under the King’s command, bringing armour. “But- oh.”

_Thorin._

Frerin nodded again, a shudder to his stance.

Thrain still stood alone, in chains, Bilbo realised as he turned his attention back to the hall, unable to process what he had just learned. Dwarves were already binding armour to the King, stripping him of his jewels to replace them with steel. But Thrain’s arms were bare, his hands without weapons: Fundin and Dwalin seemed deep in some disagreement, Dwalin half a step towards the Prince, and in front of him Thorin seemed frozen still – Bilbo wasn’t even certain that he was breathing.

The room quietened as the Queen took a step forward, quiet against the echoing stone. Thror reached for her, but she brushed past him, her hair a wave of silver that seemed to catch the light. An impossible grace, some lightness that seemed wrong for any mortal being, propelled her forward: he strode past the guards, ignoring the courtiers and even the Royal Family.

Her hand met Thrain’s cheek: she cradled his face for a moment, her thumb wiping a smear of dirt from his skin.

“This is a sorry mess,” she said, and though she spoke quietly the room fell silent, desperate to hear. She raised a wry brow at that, but did not move.

“I’m sorry, Ulla,” Thrain replied, and his shoulders sagged, just a little. “I-”

“Hush,” she told him. “What do you need?”

He shook his head. “You should not. It is forbidden to help those accused of treason.”

Bilbo half expected her to take a step back, but he had underestimated her: she seemed undeterred by this, and she straightened, and smiled: it was the first time he had seen her smile properly, he realised now, the first time he had seen her light up in this way, and even he had to swallow at how beautiful she was, how fierce and brave she looked, taller now than she had been before, somehow _more_ for her courage, and Bilbo realised that beneath her cold beauty there must lie a will stronger than iron, something fiercer than fire.

“By the end of this, either I will be without husband or without my dearest friend,” the Queen told Thrain, tucking a strand of his hair behind his ear. “Things will not be same again, regardless of whether I help you now.”

Thrain nodded, slowly, and his eyes were bright.

“Now,” the Queen asked, and her voice was louder. “I require volunteers, I think. The Prince needs his weapons, and his armour. Who will aid me?”

Dwalin shrugged his father’s arm off, and stepped forward: from somewhere close by Bilbo saw the swell of movement as someone else close to the dais strode forward. There was a moment of stillness, and then the Princess Dis was in the strange open ground between crowd, King and accused. She was a little pale, but when father and daughter set eyes on each other both seemed to smile, just a little.

“Friends still, it seems,” Thrain murmured, just loud enough for Bilbo to catch. And then, louder still, loud enough that Thror turned to glare at them:

“A sword, I think.”

 

* * *

 

 

“Hey!”

The whisper came through the Royal library, sharp and low. The librarian turned, startled, but his narrow shoulders relaxed when he caught sight of the figure lurking in the shadows of the shelves, though the worried expression did not shift from his face.

“What are you doing here?” he hissed.

The figure shrugged, though it lacked the languid movement that the librarian knew. He was tense: more than that, he realised – the shadowy figure was afraid.

“Wha-” he began, but he was interrupted by the door opening: he span on his heel, already moving to stand between it and the figure by the bookcases, to try and hide them from the intruder, but once more he found himself relaxing when he caught sight of one of the senior members of the Master of Ceremonies’ team. His silver hair caught the light: a rare and beautiful hair colour that drew admiration so often that it was normally covered by a hood, even when he was indoors.

The new dwarf glared at the figure by the bookshelves, who was now lighting a pipe.

“What do you think you’re doing, sending me a message at a time like this? I’ll be missed in minutes!”

The figure glanced between the two of them, well respected members of the team that collectively cared for the Royal family and their apartments.

“Things are becoming too dangerous. I’m here to get the two of you out of here.”

There was a moment of stunned silence, before the oldest dwarf snapped.

“If you think I’ve spent all this time leaving back doors open so you could sneak in to see that damned guard-”

The figure in the shadows offered a sardonic, quiet retort, although the older dwarf did not stop in his own lecturing. “Because of course I’ve enjoyed _every_ moment of it.”

“-just to have you ruin our cover now!”

The librarian was wringing his hands, looking between the two of them nervously.

“That’s not what I mean!” snapped the third dwarf, taking his pipe from his mouth. “This isn’t a game, you old fool.”

“We cannot disobey now!”

“We are not disobeying,” the shadowy figure replied, tapping the pipe out on the side of a shelf in agitation. “We need to get out. I’ve had word from the throne room: the mad old King has charged Thrain under the blood laws. One way or another we’re losing royal blood today, and I’ll be damned if either of you end up in the line of fire should anyone decide that now is the best time to take a piece out of anyone else in here.”

That silenced the other two for a moment, until the librarian piped up, his voice cautious.

“But what about-”

The figure shook his head furiously.

“She’d want me to do this!”

The librarian was still fidgeting.

 “What about the Princes?”

This time it was the silver-haired dwarf’s turn to point a finger at the young librarian, who was pulling the sleeves of his tunic down over his fingers nervously.

“I’ve heard enough rumours about you and the Princes, and I’ve told you before: don’t get involved with royalty.”

“They’ll fuck us all over before they’re done,” chipped in the figure from the shadows.

There was a moment where the older two might have smiled at each other, though it was two dark to tell: even the youngest seemed oddly happy, as if it were rare that the other two ever agreed on anything. But then the silver haired dwarf sighed, returning to the previous conversation.

“We can’t.”

The figure by the shelves let out a strange and strangled sound of frustration, his voice cracking, full of unexpressed emotion, full of grief. It was a surprising slip from him: both of the other dwarves regarded him with an uncertain sort of caution as his fist hit the bookshelf, not hard enough to cause any particularly loud noise, but enough to vent some of the frustration that he was clearly feeling.

“I can’t – I can’t protect you both whilst you’re here! I have friends down in the mines that will get you out of the mountain – and should nothing happen, you can always come back! Just spend a couple of days in Dale, wait for my signal, and-”

The librarian folded his arms, looking suddenly quite startlingly severe. It didn’t sit quite right with his long sleeves and young face, but at the same time it did seem to fit him, in an odd imperceptible way, as if it was an expression that he had grown up imitating from such a young age that he could now pull it out as if it were his own.

“And what about you?”

The other dwarf waved a hand in the air: his nonchalance, normally perfectly executed, seemed thin.

“I am needed here. I can’t leave-”

“Then how do you expect us to?” retorted the older, silver-haired dwarf. “And I know what you mean by ‘needed’. You mean that you’re willing to see this long journey out to the bitter end, no matter what that means for you. Don’t think that we don’t know what you do, what you would be willing to lie your life down for. And we’re not leaving you to die here, nameless and without renown. Not alone.” The librarian nodded, in agreement.

“This is our Kingdom, just as much as it is yours. Don’t expect us to defend it any less than you.”

The shadowy figure’s shoulders slumped, as if he already realised that he had been defeated.

“I doubt that this is a coup I can survive,” he answered them both, his voice barely above a whisper, though it was strangely emotionless, as if this was a conclusion that he had reached and come to terms with many years ago. “That was probably his plan all along, really: in the shadows enough for one side not to know that I am working for them, too implicated for the other not to realise. When it happens-”

“If it happens,” said the silver-haired dwarf, his face stern in the low light.

“You’ve done enough, brother,” said the younger of the dwarves, coming close enough that he could reach out and touch his shoulder, a rare moment of physical contact between them. You couldn’t touch shadows, after all – they don’t even exist.

It was the turn of the older dwarf to nod this time. “You’ve given your life up under the mad King’s conditions. Should you be required to give any further, I’m afraid that they will have to get through the two of us first.”

Sometime later, two figures slipped from the library. Both wore grim expressions, both were strung with tensions, though only one of them was seen.

Inside the library, the youngest brother buried his head in his hands, and wondered what the night would bring, and whether any of them – including her – would make it out of the palace alive.

 

* * *

 

 

“Raala,” came the whisper from just above her ear. She did not turn: she knew her husband’s voice better than anyone’s, after their many long years together. It was low enough that it wouldn’t be heard by anyone, not in the murmur of voices and the clink of armour being placed on two dwarves in the centre of the room. She still frowned, just a little, before nodding just a little: there was only reason that he would whisper to her here, and despite their hushed tones, it was still dangerous.

Still, a new order would be set today, one way or another. It was rather likely that they would end up in a perilous situation, one way or another.

“A stray bird has left a gift in my pocket,” was Fundin’s low response, an old and familiar code from back when they were both closer to assassins than courtiers. “A message.”

She glanced around them carefully: there was a perceptible circle around them, one that had formed when Dwalin had stepped forward to aid the Prince (and oh, her heart ached for her youngest son, so reckless and so loyal, refusing to stand down from anything that he believed to be right, no matter what the response was – and should Thror win, there would be a response indeed to Dwalin’s treachery. Aiding a traitor to the throne was considered an act of treason in its own right, and despite their laws regarding trials, the King’s influence stretched far further into the realms of justice than it had any right to).

Only Balin was left anywhere near to them, and he gave no indication that he could hear anything (although that meant little: their older son had inherited his parent’s tact, their subtlety. Turning to them now would only draw attention to them, and he was smarter than that).

She blinked, once: go on.

“Word has got out. The crows are flocking by the gate: whatever the results, it seems that today will be the day that they fly.”

She closed her eyes for a moment.

The gathering masses, the disenfranchised and poor, those who had lost too much under Thror’s rule: too many of them to even calculate now. There was nothing like a good bit of political instability to prompt a revolution.

Had it been any other member of the Royal line on the throne, or even the Thror of a few decades ago, she would not have hesitating in sharing this information with them, in convincing them to call off this duel so that they could focus on the more pressing forces that at any moment could break over the palace complex like a wave. But Thror would hear no reason. She knew that, as well as she knew her own name.

Instead, she reached for her oldest son, and wrapped an arm around his shoulder, burying her face against the braids that ran the side of his head as if in grief, or sorrow. No dwarf present would not have realised the implication of Dwalin stepping forward to help the Prince: the line of Fundin had balanced a precarious line for centuries now, and his actions threw them all off balance.

She whispered quickly into his ear, her mouth hidden by the fall of her own hair – and when had it become so grey, she wondered as she spoke. When had age caught up with her? Her bones ached as if a battle were already on them – she was the Old Guard, wiser for it but with less strength in her, too.

He patted her hair comfortingly: his face was creased in an expression that to anyone would be seen as acute worry, and when she pulled away he took her face and knocked his forehead against her, as if in comfort.

It wasn’t, of course: it was in agreement. A few minutes later he had slipped away.

 

* * *

 

 

Bilbo was shaking.

It was a strange sort of thing, really. It wasn’t that he had never had a fit of the quivers, as his mother had liked to call them, before now: he had known them from the cold, from grief, and from fear, many times in his life. He had known them too in other contexts: the touch of a hand through his hair, the tension waiting for something to happen, from staring too long into Thorin’s eyes or even from thinking too long of the dwarf, as if his small, too-skinny body could not cope with the weight of all that he felt about the Prince. But right now, it seemed as if he was shaking for none of those reasons.

He was afraid, of course: for Thrain, for Thorin, for all the dwarves in the room and for the Kingdom, and yes, even for Thror too. He should not be hated, Bilbo thought: rather, he should be pitied. He had seen his mother taken by a force beyond her control, had watched an illness with no natural cause strip everything that had been good and bright about her until there was very little left of the woman that he had known and loved for all of his life. Thror was much the same.

Yes, he was afraid, and the tension in the room was enough to set his teeth on edge, and yes, he grieved too, but that wasn’t it – or at least, wasn’t all of it.

No, right now he was shaking because Frerin still had a tight hold of his wrist, tighter even than before perhaps, and he was shaking because _Frerin_ was.

Strong, funny, capable Frerin, who could see so much more than anyone else could ever hope to: Frerin who had taken Bilbo’s discovery in his stride; Frerin who had spent his whole life knowing that people always had, and always would, assume less of him for what others assumed to be some kind of infirmity; Frerin who wore his humour about his shoulders as if it were a cloak that he could use to brush off pity; Frerin who would have taken the Arkenstone himself, who might now have been standing there in place of his father, had only Bilbo not been there to insist on doing the job himself.

He seemed unable to stop the shaking – Bilbo was not even really sure if he was aware of it. It was a strange contrast, he couldn’t help but think, in an odd and abstract way, to Thorin, who stood so still, as if he was not even present, as if his mind had taken flight, had run to clear skies and better days, leaving his empty body his only witness to the events unfurling before them.

Bilbo risked a glance up to Frerin’s face, a little afraid of what he might see there, but his expression was clear, his eyes shining such a gold in the torchlight (such a warmer colour than the sickly glow of the Arkenstone) that they might have been made of the stuff, red hot and liquid.

Before them Thror stood on the dais.

It seemed the attending dwarves were done: he stood now in full armour, glinting gold in the light, heavily embossed with symbols that Bilbo did not understand but he was sure had some significant meaning. The armour was grand, was beautiful, and only emphasised the breadth of Thror’s shoulders; it was unscarred, as if no blade or blunted weapon had ever reached its surface. Standing like this he looked like a King from stories of old, like some grand and noble figure of myth, his crown resting on his brow. His eyes were still a little hazy, but he looked strong, and terribly fierce, some great knight, shining gold in the dimly lit cavern. Looking at him now, it was impossible to imagine him losing – and when Bilbo turned his eyes to Thrain, that only seemed more certain.

Thrain was a little unsteady on his feet; they had removed the chains from his wrists and ankles, but not the shackles, and they seemed to be weighing him down even now. He was a little stooped under the weight of his armour, plain and serviceable stuff that looked as if it had seen battle more than a few times. Dwalin offered him a helmet but he shook his head, his hair falling forward, lank and unwashed. He was thin, his cheeks hollow, his expression tired – how was it possible for him to win against such a foe?

The King stepped down: the Prince stepped forward. There was a movement in the crowd as everyone seemed to step away from them, giving them space, and the wave of it should have forced them all backwards, but for the fact that the rest of the room seemed as intent on avoiding the rest of the royal family too. Bilbo was protected by this movement to avoid Frerin, who looked so young, still shaking, as if afraid.

There was no call to begin: there was no sign, no loud voice shouting the start of a match, for this was a battle, not some gain. One moment they were still, then the next Thror was moving, his weapon raised, and they met with a clash that seemed so loud that it almost hurt to hear.

Bilbo had never seen a fight like this, not from so close, not whilst being so static himself: the movement was too quick, the flicker of their swords too bright – there was an ache building behind his eyes, and he longed to reach for Thorin, to touch his arm or his shoulder or his face, to find some comfort and perhaps to offer it in the warmth of shared touch. For if it was so painful for Bilbo to watch them, the speed of their movements and the rage in their eyes, then he could only imagine how Thorin must have been feeling right now. But he could not: all he could do was follow their fight, watch the way that they came together, their movements so swift, so practised: this was no scrap between amateurs, but a fight between two tried and tested warriors, every swing done with deliberation and skill, every blow that fell off their armour hard and brutal.

Thror let out an inarticulate sound of rage as yet another swing glanced off armour, and with a swift and wild motion, ripped at the leather straps holding his chest plate on from one side, the thick and heavy bands tearing apart under the force of his ire. He shrugged it off the other shoulder, his eyes wide, spittle flecked around his mouth, dripping from his beard.

“To the death!” he cried, the madness bright in his glare. “Away with that which might protect you from my sword, dog! We fight as we should have from the start!”

Thrain let out a deep breath, and nodded, taking a careful step back before unbuckling his own chest plate. Bilbo swallowed, nervously.

They began again, only now they seemed less evenly matched: Thrain seemed slower against the force that was Thror’s determination. Though he was older, he seemed no less strong, no slower for it, fired as he was by a resolve that Thrain, for all his grief and exhaustion, simply couldn’t match. He ducked and he blocked, but his feet were moving with less grace, his breathing heavier, this fight obviously taking more out of him than he could manage – and Bilbo had to wonder, as he watched them dance across the floor, dwarves rushing to move out of the way, Thror clearly on the attack, when the last time it was that Thrain managed to eat.

Then the King swung, a stinging blow, and Thrain stumbled as the blade nicked his neck, not too deep a wound but one that bled suddenly, profusely, a spurt of it down his neck and shoulder that made Bilbo gasp, just a little too loud: luckily, no one heard him, all too busy staring at the sight before them.

For Thror had lunged at Thrain, his sword lax in one hand as his other reached for that neck, as if he had suddenly become strong enough to lift him one handed, by the throat, and choke the life from his only son, but just as his hand reached Thrain’s skin the younger dwarf’s shoulder came forward, just enough to barge him away, pushing him backwards, and it seemed for a moment that the King was going to leap forward again, perhaps to raise his sword once more, but-

But then all of a sudden, he faltered.

“Thrain,” he said, his eyes suddenly wide at the sight of the blood on his hands: he looked up, and there was a clarity in his expression, something so profoundly different that Bilbo’s breathing slowed, for just a moment.

 _He’s changed_ , he thought, a sudden understanding. It was if some light had left his eyes, some tension that Bilbo had not known was there lifting, some strange spell broken, and Bilbo could not look away, even if he had wanted to, for there suddenly was not some great and powerful lord, but just an old dwarf, shaking slightly, his son’s blood red, too red, on his hands.

The old King shook his head, looking down at himself, and then back up at his son, at the dwarves around him, his face caught in a rictus of confusion that was painful to see.

“Where-” he mumbled, before shaking his head.

Ulla took an aborted step forwards, before stopping herself; the room seemed to breathe in.

Some shade of realisation seemed to pass through Thror then: it was almost visible on his face, as he came to understand what had happened, and Bilbo felt some strange wave of anticipation roll through him, some tension that he could not explain. This was Thror, wasn’t it? His expression was confused, the lines around his eyes suddenly more pronounced at the

And with one swift movement he stepped forward again, his sword in hand, and Thrain raised his as well, moving forward to block the blow – but Thror did not raise his blade, not at all. Thrain’s momentum drew him forwards, and although he tried to pull back when he realised, the tip of the sword meet Thror’s chest none the less.

There was a moment when nothing happened: then, ever so slowly, a bright bloom of blood grew across the fabric of his tunic: some strange and morbid flower.

Bilbo could not take his eyes off it.

Thror looked at Thrain, and smiled, just a little.

He did not say anything: the two of them simply stared at each other, as if they had come to an understanding that the rest of the room was not privy to, as if some silent conversation was going on between them, only for them. Thrain shook his head, just a little, but Thror nodded, taking hold of the blade that was still digging, just a little, into his chest. Thror’s eyes dragged to the cut across Thrain’s neck; the blood had already stopped flowing, the remnants smeared across his skin, already beginning to flake, to dry.

“I hurt you,” Thror said, so quietly that Bilbo almost couldn’t hear him. “A parent should never hurt their child, but hurt you I did, and many times before today, I think.”

The old King sighed, but he seemed to feel no pain from the superficial injury; nor either from blood that was welling across his palm from where he grasped the sword. Thror took a deep breath; the sword cut in a little deeper.

A drop of blood hit the floor; it was so silent that Bilbo could almost hear it.

The two dwarves looked down at it, at that bright splash of red against the stone.

When they looked up, Thrain was crying, tears falling silently down his face, his expression contracted into some picture of grief, full of sadness and anger.

Then, with one final moment Thrain thrust forwards and upwards, letting out a loud cry of sorrow as he did so, his voice cracking. Thror let out no sound, even as the blade slid under his ribcage, running him through; not even as Thrain withdrew it, casting it to the floor with a crash that seemed far too loud in the quiet room.

Thror sunk slowly to his knees, falling down onto his side on the floor: there was a wince of pain, but he was smiling. “My son,” he whispered, and Thrain fell to the ground, his hands cradling his father’s face. “My own.”

Thrain’s breathing was heavy, his shoulders slumping as he leant over his father. Beneath them blood was pooling, staining the fabric of both of their clothes red, one of the last things that would ever unite them again.

“Father,” he replied, but his voice cracked, and he seemed unable to say anything else.

Thror smiled, a small and weak thing, barely a ghost.

“I can see,” the dying King said, his hand reaching to stroke through Thrain’s unbraided hair. “I see now; for so long, I could not, but now I do. You were right, my son – you were always right.”

“Forgive me,” Thror whispered. “I didn’t know - forgive me.”

“Father,” Thrain gasped, in reply. “I’m so sorry.”

But Thror shook his head, his hand falling back to his side. His hair, free now that his crown had fallen to the floor, was a wave of silver and grey, his eyes uncomfortably bright as they glanced away from his son, towards Thorin, who lingered still in front of Bilbo, his face unseen.

“I die a death to be proud of, my son. I have come back to myself, here at the very end, and leave behind me a line that might the wrongs that I have caused.”

He took a shuddering breath; his chest rose and fell, just once.

“I shall pass now,” he whispered, and his eyes slipped shut, with some lingering echo of a smile around his face. “Think of me well, if you can.”

And with one last breath the old King passed from this earth, his chest stilling, his skin already cooling against the stone floor. He seemed smaller now, shrunken somehow, as if with his spirit so too had passed his indomitable nature. King no longer: now he was just a dwarf, a creature of rock and fire, ready now to pass through to the stone as his ancestors had done. Not a death at the hands of courtiers or rebels, at least, but one that he was proud of at the end: he would stand now among the Line of Durin in the halls in the very depths of the Mountain, another branch in a family tree that had spread its branches wide around the world.

Thrain rested Thror’s head against the floor, gently.

Raala stepped forward, swallowing visibly.

“The King is dead,” she intoned, and there was no joy in her voice, no relief, only sorrow. She turned to Thorin, who stepped forward, turning to face the crowd. Finally Bilbo could see his face, only it wasn’t an expression that he had seen before – curiously blank, as if he was afraid of showing any emotions, afraid of showing anything. Something tight and painful clenched in Bilbo’s chest at the sight, and he took a step backwards, despite himself. Never before had he felt more distant from Thorin, never before had he felt so curiously separate.

“Long live the King,” Raala said, bowing her head low. The crowd moved with her, and one by one the surrounding dwarves fell to their knees: even Frerin, at his side, dropped down, finally letting go of Bilbo’s wrist.

He could see around the room clearly now: for a moment it felt as he and Thorin were two mountains, the only people left standing in the great hall. Tall and alone and apart, an impossible distance between them. Thorin was a King now, wasn’t he? And what was Bilbo? Just a thief, an invisible thief in the dark, a creature that barely existed, for how could something exist if barely anyone knew that it was there?

 _If only I were visible,_ Bilbo thought, for the longest of moments. _If only I were visible, he could look over right now, and see me, and know that I am here, and know that I am here for him… and perhaps he would be able to see my feelings in my expression, would know that I need him to give me some sign, that this isn’t going to push us apart, that I am not going to lose him because of this._

There was a terrifying clenching in his chest: a fear that he couldn’t voice.

_This was the end, the end of all of this._

Bilbo ached, every part of him, suddenly nauseous.

_I love him, I love him, and he’s never going to forgive me for what I’ve done._

“Thrain, son of Thror,” Thorin said, his voice quiet, emotionless; he did not look at his father, as if he was unable to. “Before all the dwarves here you have slayed your own father: under the laws of our kin, I ask if any dwarf can step forward and deny your crime.”

There was silence, and after a moment, Thorin nodded.

“A trial will be held-” he began, but Thrain shook his head.

“There is no need, my son,” Thrain said, and he did not sound angry, nor even upset: instead his voice sounded lighter than Bilbo had ever heard it before, as if he had already accepted what was going to happen. “I accept my guilt now, and revoke the right to a trial. Sentence me, as the King of Erebor that you were always going to be.”

Thorin swallowed, and just for a moment some raw and indistinguishable emotion flickered through his eyes, but it passed too quickly for Bilbo to really understand it.

“Very well,” he replied, and he drew himself up, looking suddenly taller than he ever had before. “Then under the laws of the Mountain, I sentence you to exile, from this Kingdom and from all of its peoples. Never again will you see the stone of your forebears, or hear the songs of your people.”

Thrain nodded, and his mouth curled up into something of a smile as he looked at his son, the light in his eyes full of pride and regret but clear, and understanding.

“Long live the King,” Thrain said, his voice raw, and proud.

“Long live the King,” the bowing crowd repeated again, the words echoing through Bilbo, shaking him to his very core, low and full of a strange and full of wretched feeling.

 

* * *

 

 

No one saw Frerin slip out of the room; there was too much clamour, too much noise, too much commotion. Dis was crying as Thrain bowed his head at his son’s declaration, but he ducked away, knowing that if he stopped to help her then he would not be able to leave without his absence being missed.

He knew the tunnels and corridors of this mountain better than he knew anything: the stone had called to him since the moment he was born, echoing through his mind, and he had been listening to its song since before he had even understood the words. He could no longer remember how long it had been weeping; he couldn’t even remember the day that it had starting crying louder, and louder, and louder than before, only that as the years had passed the noise had grown, swelling around him, until just recently it had become almost deafening. He hadn’t slept properly in so long, had spent so much energy trying to keep his exhaustion hidden – and thank the stone that Thorin had been so distracted of late with his invisible friend and the King’s madness, for if anyone would have seen passed his façade it would have been him.

 He could feel the heavy footsteps of dwarves approaching the palace, too many dwarves, and for a moment he hesitated, wavering on the brink of indecision – but there were dwarves a plenty to protect his family here, and he could not wait any longer: he knew better than anyone how that stone called to people, what it did to their minds, what madness it could pull from good, honest dwarves.

It would not stay hidden for long.

And only he was able to understand it; only he would be able to secure it.

He hurried away: it would be a while before anyone made it to the gate, he was sure, though his perception had been a little off recently, just slightly fuzzy around the edges. A good night’s sleep, he was sure, would be enough to set him right again.

A corridor; a passageway; a small alcove behind a statue that hid more than shadows. Soon enough he was out of the royal quarters, hastening away from the familiar throb of his family’s hearbeat, a circuitous route that only bore the lingering presence of one dwarf other than Frerin, a dwarf that his father trusted. Then in the streets, and he pulled the hood of his cloak over his hair, hunching over; now was not the time to be seen. A road, a side street, an alleyway between two buildings that lead only to bare rock, only it wasn’t bare rock, not to anyone who could feel the stone the way that he did. He didn’t need to feel along the surface to find the tell-tale crack; he did it immediately, pushing at it, until what had appeared to be solid stone slid, just a little, with a low grind. Smugglers tunnels; he shut the way behind him again, and went on alone into the dark.

It didn’t take him long after that. He knew ways that no dwarf did; the stone opened up before him, and soon enough he found himself in a passageway, untouched by Mahal’s folk.

Bilbo had been here.

Not this exact route, perhaps; no, it seemed that the thief had come to this passage way through another route, but that did not concern him. All he could think about was what he would find at the end of the tunnel. Frerin carried on, his heartbeat hammering in his chest.

He would not see the light coming as Bilbo had done earlier; there was no distant glow to comfort him: instead he kept his hands pressed to the stone and moved forward, feeling ahead of him with his own gift, the one that he had never been able to explain.

_Closer, closer, closer_

The screams were louder: somewhere far away a dwarf was crying, their tears falling on to the stone. He didn’t know them, didn’t know their grief, but the rock amplified it, louder and louder, until he thought for a moment that he might go mad from it, down here in the darkness, in this hidden passage that only he and one small thief seemed to know.

Teeth, sharp and strong, and not stone at all, a jagged edge in the periphery of his mind.

_Sharp enough to bite, sharp enough to kill_

The screams were deafening now.

He thought, for a moment, that he heard someone laughing, close by, but he knew that it was impossible: there was no one else down here but him.

Fear caught at his throat, clawing at his mouth, as if trying to pull itself free of him.

And then his hands closed around the Arkenstone, and the weight of its familiar presence settled through his bones as if in welcome, and he closed his sightless eyes in relief.

All around him, was suddenly silent.


End file.
